In Defense of Low Expectations

[Valin]

National Review:

Ian Tuttle

November 12, 2015

 

Great expectations preface great disappointments, as the students at Yale and Vanderbilt and the University of Missouri, currently dismantling their institutions in a fit of inchoate rage, remind us. Writing in City Journal, Matt Hennessey fills out the context of that disappointment:

 

 

The average 18- to 25-year-old remembers the lofty promises of hope and change that he heard from Obama during his presidential campaigns. He looks at the American political system and thinks to himself: “Even the great Obama can’t snap his fingers and bring about the world of perfect justice that I desire.” What does he conclude? That all politics — even Democratic Party politics — are irredeemably broken. It’s time to tear that down, too.

 

 

“Lofty” is an understatement. Senator Barack Obama’s promises were stratospheric:

 

(Snip)

 

It is a bipartisan phenomenon, of course. Republicans overpromised in the wake of last year’s midterm victories. There has never been a realistic possibility of overturning Obamacare as long as the president who signed it was still in the White House, and there was never any realistic possibility, as long as Democrats toed the party line, of stopping Obama’s Iran deal. There were winnable fights, to be sure, but they were left unfought, and the backlash against Republican officeholders can be partly explained as the curdling of high — improperly high — hopes.

 

And so, with a presidential election looming, the warning to our current crop of candidates should be obvious. I would love to believe that Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Ben Carson will reduce our constitutional republic to a Nockian paradise where Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrats are employed by the Koch brothers to build the Keystone pipeline, and Secretary of Defense Rick Perry personally leads routine F-35 overflights of Tehran, and Toby Keith gives a show on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial while Americans fry bacon on their gun barrels and tar and feather Lois Lerner.

 

But it’s not going to happen. Not just in George Will’s sense is politics like football: In both, progress more often than not comes in small, punishing advances. And because of the successes of the Obama administration over the past seven years, which have entrenched not only massive, complex programs, but the understanding of state/citizen relations that accompanies them, a Republican president will face an unprecedented amount of inertia.

 

(Snip)