Undoubtedly remembering how the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was characterized by FDR - with that "New Deal" description of Roosevelt's administration having been validated by historians - Peggy Noonan characterizes the administration of our current president as follows: "The Art Of The Self-Deal." A pull-quote in The Wall Street Journal highlights the topic that Noonan explores: "Thoughts on how Trump-era corruption is affecting Americans as a people."
To cut to the chase, Noonan thinks that the effects of "Trump-era corruption" are NOT helping Americans as a people. In fact, here are the concluding three paragraphs of Noonan's column (emphasis added):
In times of corruption, good people who might run for office, don’t. They think they can’t survive in that world. Bad people, those with limited internal ethical and moral structures, are encouraged: Politics is a way to get rich and famous, to push people around. They are elected, govern badly, corruptly, and the cycle continues.
Unchecked corruption tells cynics not that they have an uninteresting flaw but that they are realists. Never tell cynics that. It gives them license.
As always, the whole world is watching. What it has seen lowers the esteem in which it formally (if grudgingly) held Americans. It embarrasses us before the world. It hurts our heart a little. We were the morally rectitudinous Doughboy GI Marshall Planning JFK and Ronnie People who made the wall come down. We did our best each generation to be equal to our reputation, or at least to have some class. There are foreign-policy implications to all this. Some day we’ll need friends and see only the satisfied spite of the previously jealous.
You can read Noonan's argument its entirety by clicking this link - and even non-subscribers should be able to see what Noonan says. The photo I am providing you, incidentally, is the photo which The Wall Street Journal used to accompany Noonan's column.
I have one brief comment. While I think that Noonan accurately describes the typical reaction of the public to obvious (and odious) self-dealing and corruption by our current president and his cronies, that understandable and counter-productive reaction to corruption is not like some kind of chemical formula, operating by some law of inevitability.
It is possible to decide, when we see our system of self-government turned into systematic self-dealing, to do the very opposite of withdrawing from politics. Lean In, the title of a book aimed at providing good advice to women who have suffered from disregard in the world of business, is exactly the right prescription for all of us, as we witness a world of politics turned into self-dealing corruption.
We have a couple of elections coming up - and one of them is coming up soon. Let's not miss our chance to provide ourselves with a "New Deal." Once we truly lose self-government, it will be hard to build it back!
Image Credit:
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-art-of-the-self-deal-6cf57c5a
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