SWNIDish Christmas Wish: Let Little Choices Add Up

A rough picture of the New Year with the New President ushering in a New Era is now emerging. Call it a split-screen picture.

On the right side of the picture are foreign policy appointments that suggest a decent measure of realism about the world's fallenness, plus economic policy appointments suggesting a commitment to free markets, free trade and fiscal restraint. Embellish those with rhetoric about post-partisanship.

On the left side are appointments in agriculture, labor, health and human services, energy, environment that follow so-called "progressive" tropes that restrain commerce, redistribute wealth, and misidentify threats to human well being. But those are merely the embellishments on the left. The real business is the pledge to spend $1,000,000,000,000, or over $3000 per American citizen, on "stimulus" that is not so incidentally aimed at remaking the American economy.

SWNID agrees that the American economy needs remaking. It always does. Once agrarian, it became industrial, then technological. No one today works the way she worked in 1998 or 1988, even if she is in the same job (no one today uses pronouns the way she did back then either, but that's for another post). Keep jumping backwards a decade, assessing social and economic changes, and one will discover how unchanging the change is.

But the change didn't come because of a transformative administration led by a transformative individual. It came through the accumulation of small, individual choices, some of them profoundly stupid, that eventually led people through the darkness that is their immediate future to a better situation than they had in the past. One can occasionally point to decisions made by Great Individuals, governmental or otherwise, that proved crucial to the outcome, but it's utterly impossible for anyone to guess which of those decisions were crucial before their effects came to be.

So we contemplate the split screen of 2009 and beyond, what can grandly be called the Age of Obama at least until it actually occurs, and divine two possible outcomes. One is that accumulated wisdom will combine with the inherent inertia of the political process to allow only inconsequential, token efforts to transform grandly. The other is that ambition will breed hubris, colored green this time, prolonging and deepening the present distress, in the end merely to prove the bromide that people aren't as smart as they think.

Most implausible at this point is the Obamanoid pledge not to allow its legislative agenda to be decorated with special interest earmarks. Whence cometh this Strange Power to overcome the human will to power?

SWNID affirms that we need a Coolidge. SWNID fears that we elected an FDR. Or an LBJ.