From Bill Kristol's newsletter this week:
Why is the Milwaukee airport different from all other airports? Because it has a used book store. Not just any old used book store, either, but a very good one. I've got to admit that I'd rather forgotten about the existence of the Renaissance Book Shop at Mitchell International Airport until I saw it yesterday. Of course I stopped in and started to browse the extensive and excellent selection of paperback mysteries and general fiction. And then I had another pleasant surprise. I'd picked up a few old mysteries and went to pay for them, and the proprietor recognized me and remembered that I'd been there several years ago, and had used the bookstore as a peg for a newspaper column. Indeed, he (amazingly) recalled that the piece had used as its peg a book of Orwell essays. Indeed he told me he'd had the column laminated and displayed in the store for a few years, before it had been replaced by something else--by a co-worker, he hastened to add. I actually remembered the column fairly well. I'd written it early in my one-year tenure during 2008 of weekly columnizing for the New York Times, and had rather liked it at the time. I also remembered the editors' reaction to it as an early indication that the Times and I weren't going to have a successful long-term relationship. I looked the piece up when I got to my hotel room here at the lovely American Club hotel in Kohler. It was called, "Democrats Should Read Kipling," and appeared February 18, 2008: Browsing through a used-book store Friday - in the Milwaukee airport, of all places - I came across a 1981 paperback collection of George Orwell's essays. That's how I happened to reread his 1942 essay on Rudyard Kipling. Given Orwell's perpetual ability to elucidate, one shouldn't be surprised that its argument would shed light- or so it seems to me - on contemporary American politics. Orwell offers a highly qualified appreciation of the then (and still) politically incorrect Kipling. He insists that one must admit that Kipling is "morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting." Still, he says, Kipling "survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly." One reason for this is that Kipling "identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition." "In a gifted writer," Orwell remarks, "this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality." Kipling "at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like." For, Orwell explains, "The ruling power is always faced with the question, 'In such and such circumstances, what would you do?', whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions." I went on to identify the Democrats with Orwell's "opposition," and concluded, "To govern is to choose, a Democrat of an earlier generation, John F. Kennedy, famously remarked. Is this generation of Democrats capable of governing?" I claimed by contrast that Republicans, and in particular the Bush Administration, for all its faults, did understand that to govern is to face real choices with real responsibilities, whether in Iraq or in managing U.S. intelligence programs. It's easy to see in retrospect that this--appearing at the height of liberal enthusiasm in 2008 for Barack Obama--was all a bridge too far for the "refined people" at and around the New York Times. Today, despite having had the White House for the last seven years and therefore (one would think) the responsibility to govern, the left still seems to me oppositional and irresponsible in the way Orwell describes. The problem is that conservatives too, perhaps in understandable reaction to President Obama, have fallen into the trap of indulging in more simple and even self-indulgent oppositionalism than is healthy. I hasten to add that the alternative to pure oppositionalism isn't accommodation or trimming one's sails; the opposition party can put forth dramatic alternatives and a radically different governing agenda. But it does have to be a governing agenda. For Orwell is surely right that a grip on reality and a sense of responsibility, disfavored by the refined people and by the tendencies of the time, are what a modern democracy needs from the individuals and political parties that seek to lead it.
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