Kristol: Functioning Amid Hubbub

It’s exciting. You read, first with some curiosity, then with rising interest, and finally with increasing enthusiasm, about the protests in Iran. You call up friends in the think-tank world to try to get a handle on what’s going on. You speak with past and present government officials and Hill staffers to try to figure out what we could do. You encourage some of them to write up their suggestions publicly and others to share ideas privately. You counsel them not to relitigate the fights of the past but to try to build as broad a consensus as possible, without diluting the policy too much. You attend a meeting or two, and mostly listen as people who know more than you debate some tough tactical and strategic choices. You try to give a boost to the ideas that seem sensible on Twitter and fight back against counsels of passivity or various forms of foolishness on TV. And while the administration in power isn’t one you think highly of, nor one you get along with particularly well, it looks to you, a few days into the crisis, that parts of the government are getting their act together and that the president’s instincts seem to be broadly sound.

And it’s depressing. Because you can’t go long without being reminded it’s Donald Trump’s Washington. Hopes for bipartisanship are set back by gratuitous remarks about Hillary Clinton. Hopes for sober policy-making are called into question by a cavalier tweet about nuclear war in North Korea. Disputes over possible scandals and petty politics fill the airwaves. It becomes clear the White House—or at least the president—is more focused on dealing with rude remarks by Steve Bannon than with extraordinary possibilities in Iran.

So hubbub—and a rather low and distasteful hubbub—seems to prevail. And you can’t simply ignore the hubbub. Some of the scandals may be real. The potential damage to government institutions and democratic norms could be significant. Questions of character can’t simply be put aside. To all of this, attention must be paid.

How? Leo Strauss asserted that “it is safer to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself fully as what it is.”

But what is safer in the realm of understanding is not necessarily what is possible in the world of practice. If the low is real, one can’t wish it away. If low politics threatens to make it impossible to achieve the high goals of statesmanship, one has to address the low, contain it, or perhaps improve it.

In other words, one can’t just deal with Iran and ignore Trump. But one also shouldn’t obsess about Trump and neglect the challenges and opportunities of Iran.

After all, isn’t it in a way the same fight? Defending constitutional norms and the habits of freedom and self-government at home is the flip side of trying to help others establish those norms and develop those habits abroad.

This means that political actors other than the president of the United States need to step up. Administration officials need to develop policy in the midst of distractions and execute it as well as possible in an atmosphere of chaos. Members of Congress have to lead rather than follow, shape policy rather than simply react to it. Outside experts with good ideas and citizens with sound judgments have to assert themselves and be unafraid to make a difference in ways that they probably wouldn’t in more normal times.

In the utter chaos of the last year of the Nixon administration, advisers from inside and outside the White House prevailed on the president to send arms to an Israel that was under attack. Israel won the Yom Kippur War. The administration was then able to begin a process of moving the Soviet Union out of Egypt, and more broadly out of much of the Middle East, in ways that paid off just a few years later. Meanwhile, some senators and congressmen, over the objections of the administration, were able to insist on putting human rights at the center of U.S. policy towards the Soviet Union. This too paid off in a big way 15 years later.

There were, needless to say, significant costs that we and the world paid for the turmoil of 1973-74. But we made it through, and we even accomplished things along the way. This was a testament to the American system of government, which proved resilient and strong, and to the American people, who didn’t lose their bearings. But it was also a testament to particular individuals, in government and out, some famous and many forgotten, who did their duty in a moment of distraction and confusion on the one hand and crisis and opportunity on the other.