The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today. To mark our 10th anniversary, we invited several of our valued contributors to reflect on the decade past and, at least indirectly, on the years ahead. More specifically, we asked them to address this question: "On what issue or issues (if any!) have you changed your mind in the last 10 years- and why?" Their responses follow.
I HAVE CHANGED MY MIND POLITICALLY over the past 10 years only in not making it up as quickly and easily as I used to do. I still know with some precision what I dislike but have become less certain about what I like. I begin to resemble, I fear, the man who is vehemently against picketing but doesn't know what to do about it.
In the useful division of political thinkers between those who are certain of their positions and those whose clarity is clouded with doubt, I fall among the latter. Tocqueville, a doubter, complained in his Souvenirs that almost inevitably when he got up to speak in the National Assembly complexities and qualifications rushed in on him, rendering him indecisive and unpersuasive. Bismarck, the very reverse of a doubter, in his twenties given an important diplomatic assignment, exclaimed that he knew his duty, and whether or not he had the understanding to bring it off was not his but God's concern.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the well-known omelet chef, when told that they were killing the workers in Germany, replied: "Good. Worse is better [for the Revolution]." Adlai Stevenson, during his 1952 and '56 presidential campaigns, caused many a plane to circle airports over and over because he couldn't get the speech he was composing just right.
In politics, the non-doubters, the straight-ahead men, get the job done; the doubters make the more charming lunch companions. No one side, left or right, has a monopoly on doubters or straight-ahead men. I noted this many years ago when listening to frequent debates staged between Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith. The two agreed about absolutely nothing; what they had in common was their utter certitude (which, as of the moment, seems much more warranted in Friedman's than in Galbraith's case).
Although they have their uses, doubters are not finally altogether comfortable in politics. Nor are their equivocations always welcome. The time always arrives in politics when one must swallow one's doubt, get in or out, stay on or get off the bus.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the most intelligent man in the United States Senate during the past half century, was asked, at the close of his career, to introduce, and by doing so suggest his support for, Hillary Clinton as the candidate seeking to fill his Senate seat. Moynihan had no love for the Clintons, whom he thought much more interested in power than in reality. How difficult it must have been for him to put Mrs. Clinton forth as the Democratic party's candidate! But he did it. In the end, Pat Moynihan got on the bus.
Odd but politics, that least scientific of human activities--"Political science," my friend Edward Shils used to say, "with the 'science' understood as in Christian Science"--requires the most certainty on the part of its practitioners. In the end, I, too, climb on the bus, but with faltering step and usually only after being nudged from behind. I hope nobody notices that I keep a transfer in my back pocket. If you're free for lunch, give me a call.
Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and author, most recently, of Snobbery and Fabulous Small Jews.