December 24, 2006
Congressional Morons IV Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:30 PM EST Without belaboring this point too much, I want to both agree and disagree with John Steele Gordon. Of course he’s right that there’s always the temptation to idealize the past—to think, as Robert Penn Warren wrote, that “there was a long time back when everything was run by high-minded, handsome men wearing knee breeches and silver buckles.” Of course he’s also right that we tend to remember great men before we remember imbeciles. Yet at the same time I don’t think it’s such a stretch to argue that the overall quality of American public servants has deteriorated in the last century. Part of that may have to do with the disappearance of classical education. If the best educated among us entered Congress, we might still end up with a lot of representatives with fairly trivial knowledge of Shakespeare. But even with this being the case, it’s also pretty clear that the best educated Americans do not, in fact, enter public service in the numbers they once did. If they did, we’d probably have a lot more people in Congress who could understand math and science. I’m reminded of an incident I witnessed recently at an orientation for new members of the House in which a newly elected Democrat, presented with some demographic data, asked, “What proportion of the population is under the tenth percentile?” If Henry Clay were alive today, I bet he’d be a venture capitalist or a technology entrepreneur. Maybe, at some point, he’d hold an appointed job in the federal government, like Henry Paulson. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, but it means there’s one less brilliant man to enter the House. I also agree with John Steele Gordon that our own age will probably be remembered in loftier terms than we might expect. I doubt, though, that Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert, whom history cannot ignore, will ever be described in the same terms as Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams. As Mr. Gordon suggests, Spielberg and the Beatles will likely be remembered as components of a blossoming new culture. But I would expect this period to be remembered more like the last decades of the nineteenth century—in which plenty of interesting things took place, and few of them had anything to do with the government.
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