Bret Stephens: Not to put too fine a point on it, Frank, but the state of the world is terrifying. The bond markets are going crazy because we’re piling on debt like profligate Bourbons. The wars in Ukraine and Iran seem to have no end in sight. There are serious fears in Western capitals that Russia might invade a NATO member state. And Canadians hate us — for real this time, not to mention for good cause.
Solve all of our problems for us, Frank.
Frank Bruni: Get rid of President Trump and all — well, most — of what he represents. I’m not being glib. I’m not in the grip of any derangement syndrome. I’m not suggesting that he be impeached (been there, bungled that — twice!) or that he might be removed by his cabinet members, who would sooner give him a tag-team pedicure. And I’m not saying that his exit from the political stage would solve or prevent the horrors you laid out. But it’s a prerequisite, and it begins — I hope, I pray — with a midterm repudiation of unignorable proportions.
Bret: I can think of other midterm repudiations that did next to nothing to change our overall trajectory: 2018, during Trump’s first term, when Democrats took the House; or 2010, during Barack Obama’s first, when Republicans took the House; or 2006, during George W. Bush’s second term, when Democrats took both houses, most governorships and nearly a majority of state legislatures; or even 1994 … you get my drift.
Frank: It’s a fair point. But consider the alternative — that there’s no blue wave, not even a blue ripple — and how Trump and his abettors react to that.
Bret: My point is that the eventual end of Trump’s presidency, whether it happens when he can no longer control Congress or when he moves out of the White House, solves fewer problems than either of us would hope. Trumpism — which is just a form of charismatic illiberal populism — has become a global phenomenon. Profligate government spending is as endemic in Europe as it is here. There is no longer a global consensus in favor of free trade — or even free speech. And Vladimir Putin and other dictators are probably still going to be around whenever Democrats finally retake the White House. Trump is more symptom than cause, and there needs to be much deeper thinking about how and where Western politics went wrong.
Frank: Yes but. Wait — make that yes and. Despite Trump’s best attempts to turn the United States into both the Freddy Krueger and the Homer Simpson of the world, other countries still take cues from us, consciously and subconsciously. His diminution might well be a drag on the charismatic populism you mention. And the recent shift of global agreements and trajectories shows that such agreements are not fixed and such trajectories are not static. The teetering and then toppling of Trump would send a message larger than Trump, with consequences beyond him and MAGA. And while the multipolar or multilateral world would remain, at least a post-Trump American president trying to manage and have an impact on it would be less inept and less corrupt than Trump — an assumption I make because more inept and more corrupt seem philosophically, cognitively and biometrically impossible.
Bret: We agree that the world will surely be in a better place when the man I like to call Benito Milhous Caligula exits the stage. But those of us, liberal or conservative, who want to save the free world need to ask ourselves some tough questions about how we got here. My dear pal Richard North Patterson, the novelist, has a powerful new nonfiction book, “Tripwires,” which examines 15 events in this century and how they crippled American democracy. I disagree with him on some of the particulars (which our readers should take as a strong recommendation for Ric’s book) but he’s absolutely right that our problems are much deeper than one man and his flatuous administration.
My view is that everything started going wrong when we abandoned the cause of teaching civics.
Frank: As a member of (theatrically clears throat, arrogantly puffs chest) the academy, I can tell you that the teaching of civics — how to resurrect it, how best to make it effective — is a major topic of conversation among university leaders and professors. We know we need to elevate our game. But civics instruction must begin much, much earlier than college, all the more so because college isn’t an aspiration or the wisest choice for many people. And K-12 educators in America are struggling to teach children reading, writing and arithmetic as it is. I’ve advocated adding media literacy to the curriculum. Still do. Ditto for civics. But what in our experience of how American children are performing in, say, algebra, and what about our shamefully inadequate support of public education, lead us to believe we can successfully throw civics into the mix?
Bret: I don’t think funding is the problem: The U.S. spends more money on average on elementary and secondary school students than nearly every other country. Yet our educational outcomes are abysmal. The larger problems, I think, come down to competence, ideology and polarization. With brave exceptions (as well as programs like “Teach for America”) teaching has become a low-status profession that repels great people. Fixing that has a lot to do with pay; it also has a lot to do with bureaucratic rules that protect bad teachers at the expense of good ones.
As for ideology, the country is struggling to agree even on a base line idea of how civics should be taught, a set of common principles that can unite Americans across divides of race, class, geography and partisanship. In the process, we’ve also lost the idea that the purpose of a good education is to make a good citizen, capable of sacrificing for the common good — like, for instance, accepting higher taxes or fewer benefits in order to get the deficit under control.
Frank: When I said inadequate support for public education, I wasn’t thinking only or even primarily about funding. Part of inadequate support is blurring schools’ missions and blunting their ability to be effective by sweeping them into the culture wars you allude to. And funding is a complicated topic: We shovel a lot of money into schools, but not in the right ways. In many states and communities, we simply don’t pay teachers nearly enough to attract and retain the most talent possible. That’s a problem independent of unions’ (many) failings. In the terrific 2013 book “The Smartest Kids in the World,” Amanda Ripley shows how much success Finland has had with higher salaries for teachers and a culture of greater respect for them.
Bret: I’m always leery of comparisons to Scandinavian countries, not because there isn’t much to admire in them, but because small, ethnically homogenous countries like Finland don’t make for great comparisons with a country as large and diverse as ours.
Frank: I think a Finland, a Sweden, a Norway or even an Iceland can have a few discrete lessons for us that translate and transfer, much like Bjork does.
Bret: Or pancakes with lingonberry jam at IKEA.
Frank: I do agree with you wholeheartedly about the greater purpose of education, and I devoted the final stretch of my most recent newsletter, along with much of the newsletter before it, to that. The ideal education teaches us how to live thoughtfully, ethically and productively with others — and with ourselves.
Bret: The boldest university presidents need to do two hard things at once.
First, tell incoming freshmen — and the parents shelling out fortunes on their behalf — that the primary purpose of a university education is to help make them wise, whether or not it makes them rich, rather than rich, whether or not it makes them wise. Second, insist that no student can graduate without being grounded in the essentials of a real liberal education: Plato and Aristotle; the book of Genesis and the Sermon on the Mount; Locke and de Tocqueville and Lincoln and Douglass; Darwin and Einstein; Austen, Tolstoy, Steinbeck and Mann.
And Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare. All the rest is commentary.
Frank: Well, I think there’s room for a few more modern figures and for more diversity in that reading list, though I thank you for Austen. In the interests of modernity, can I yank us back into the political moment and ask you what you make of both Abdul El-Sayed’s and Vice President JD Vance’s outreach to Jewish voters over the past week? Do you find it sincere? Persuasive? I know you’re not fond of either politician, which makes me doubly interested in how you think they’re dealing with what they obviously know is many Jews’ distrust of them.
Bret: Short answer: No. Longer answer: Naaaaaaaaah.
El-Sayed’s infamous excuse for the terrorist who drove a truck into a Michigan synagogue, “hurt people hurt people,” wasn’t an inapt turn of phrase put to rest with his quasi apology. It was a worldview that holds that anger at Israel is the reason, and perhaps the justification, for attacks on Jews in the United States. His despicable booster, Hasan Piker, put it more crisply: “If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action.”
As for Vance, I’ll believe that his outreach to Jewish voters is sincere when he acknowledges that Tucker Carlson is an embarrassment and a disgrace. For which … I won’t be holding my breath.
Frank: There will never be room for “sincerity” and JD Vance in the same sentence. The same paragraph. The same book. The same library. I haven’t seen and learned enough about El-Sayed to know if that’s true of him as well, though I’ve observed moments when he definitely seemed more ambitious and calculating than sincere. You know, Bret, I’m at a point where I’m wondering — from the sound bites, the jargon, the platitudes, the fakery, the flipping, the flopping — if only a fool ever takes any politician at his or her word. I guess I still care a lot about the tone that a politician strikes. But beyond that? Look at the record, not the rhetoric.
Speaking of tone and language, any reading recommendations for us?
Bret: Oddly — or maybe not — by far the most enjoyable book I’ve read in a long while is all about death. Or at least writing about death. It’s by our colleague Sam Roberts, obit writer sans pareil, and the book is called “Are They Dead Yet?” It’s a deep dive into the delicate art of summing up, in several hundred words or so, the complicated lives of the just deceased. To give you a taste: “The modern maestro of circumlocution was the ever-resourceful Hugh Massingberd,” Sam writes.
Massingberd was an aficionado of the euphemism to deliver hints about a departed individual’s blemishes, which his regular readers did not require a code book to decipher. By “powerful negotiator” he meant a bully. Someone who “gave colorful accounts of his exploits” was, in other words, a liar. Massingberd gussied up the technique he arcanely called the posthumous parallax, “a bending of life histories towards all that is light and wholesome, away from anything that might reflect unfavorably on the dead.” A surviving relative in Australia described the deceased as having “worshipped at the altar of St. Agnes,” the patron saint of young girls and chastity, and which also was the name of a famous distillery in Australia that dates from the late nineteenth century. “In other words,” Massingberd wrote, “the subject of my assignment had given the brandy a fair old shake with, ultimately, fatal results.”
And so on. If only dying itself were half as interesting. Or as funny.
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