What a week! Newly minted White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci goes nuts; White House chief of staff Reince Priebus gets fired and is replaced by retired Marine general John Kelly; General Kelly fires Scaramucci; Kelly then reassures Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had recently been under unprecedented public assault from the president, that Sessions won’t be fired (which presumably also means special counsel Robert Mueller won’t be fired).
Meanwhile the Republican attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare collapses in the Senate. National security adviser H. R. McMaster engages in some serious housecleaning at the National Security Council. And we learn that the president personally helped craft, on Air Force One, a false statement about a meeting of his son, son-in-law, and a top campaign strategist with sketchy Russian emissaries during a presidential campaign in which Russia intervened in unprecedented ways.
And there’s more!
Of course there is. It’s the Trump presidency.
But last week also saw headlines like these: “Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Robots Shut Down after They Start Talking to Each Other in Their Own Language.” And “In Gene-Editing Advance, Scientists Correct Defect in Human Embryos.” And “U.S. Slams North Korea Missile Test as Kim Claims ‘Whole U.S. Mainland’ in Reach.” And “The War America Can’t Win: How the Taliban Is Regaining Control in Afghanistan.”
Some of these headlines are surely misleading or hyped. Still, it’s obvious we face serious challenges—challenges posed both by the march of modernity and by those who reject modern liberty and modern civilization.
It would be nice if we could pretend the second, deeper set of problems is of no urgency and can be dealt with when we’re blessed with a more serious president and a more substantial public discourse.
It would also be nice if we could set aside worrying about our president and the distractions of our current politics in order to focus on the more serious challenges. But dealing with serious problems requires presidential leadership and serious decisions arrived at through political discussion.
So we’re stuck. We need to deal with both urgent and important challenges, and we don’t get to call a timeout from one to cope with the other.
It’s tough. At least those who worried, after the end of the Cold War, that history would present neither interestingly fundamental nor urgently existential challenges can now stop worrying. The challenges are here. The choices are real. And inaction and delay are also choices with real consequences.
Ages ago, back before artificial intelligence and robots and nuclear weapons, Alexander Hamilton observed in Federalist 1 that “it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice.” That question from the 18th century is no less pressing, and its answer is no less certain, in the 21st century. And as it was then so it is today: “a wrong election of the part we shall act may . . . deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.”
In other words: The temporary misfortune of a demagogue in the Oval Office, the broader problem of an unenlightened populism, the perhaps even deeper challenge of a blind and destructive progressivism—none of these excuses us from the urgent responsibility and inspiring opportunity to vindicate the capacity of mankind for self-government.
