“The ‘Oh, Grow Up’ Election” is an interesting essay, brought to my attention by a longtime source, by the pioneering baseball sabermatician Bill James.
He contrasts Toughness, which he argues characterized most Americans of his father’s generation, with the Sensitivity demanded by the politically correct today. James pinpoints the nation’s switch from valuing Toughness to valuing Sensitivity as the year 1963, which of course is the year of the assassination of President Kennedy; my American Enterprise Institute colleague Charles Murray in his 2012 book Coming Apart pinpoints the day before that event, Nov. 21, 1963, as “the symbolic last day of the culture that preceded” what he calls (with a capital letter) the Sixties.
James makes the point that there’s a lot to be said for both Toughness and Sensitivity, and suggests that the victory of President-elect Trump was a perhaps overdue attempt to get the balance right. The Tough/Sensitive polarity reminds me of another, which I have written about, between Crunchiness and Sogginess.
It was a theme I used in my Introduction to the 2000 Almanac of American Politics (written nearly 18 years ago!) and in a Washington Examiner column late last summer. That column criticized European Union official Jean Claude Juncker’s ridiculous statement that “borders are the worst invention ever made by politicians.” I left to the side that borders were invented not by the kind of politicians we know but by kings and soldiers and made the point that they were inherently crunchy — and that that is a good thing. The larger point is that you do want some things, like national borders, to be crunchy and that the tendency of intellectuals and international bureaucrats to eliminate distinctions produces a sogginess that doesn’t serve people well.
By way of explanation, I wrote,
“Denigration of borders is an example of what Nico Colchester called ‘sogginess’ in a famous 1988 Economist editorial. The opposite was crunchiness. ‘Crunchy systems are those in which small changes have big effects leaving those affected by them in no doubt whether they are up or down,’ Colchester wrote. ‘Sogginess is comfortable uncertainty.'”
Crunchy choices are binary; the light switch is either off or on, with clearly distinct consequences. Soggy choices represent only a marginal, perhaps imperceptible change. Crunchiness and sogginess, like off-on light switches and dimmers, both have their uses and their drawbacks — just as Toughness and Sensitivity do. Getting the balance right in an unending task, and those prone to optimism may hope that Trump helps us to do better at that.
