FIFTY YEARS AGO.

In the course of getting a few more book reviews ready to go, I dipped into Theodore H. White's The Making of the President, 1972, where I found a few observations that anticipated our current pass.  It's worth recalling as you read through these that Mr White was very much of the Atlantic Establishment, and yet he could identify what themes Richard Nixon raised that appealed to people not of that establishment.  Consider page xviii in the preface.

The orthodoxies of the postwar world were trembling  -- the Keynesian theories of economics, the social workers' theorems of the Great Society were demonstrably inadequate.  So, too, were engineering theories, planning theories, finance theories.  The government had built highways which destroyed cities and ruined railways and public transportation; the government had financed suburbs with cheap credit and strangled the cities that lived inside their ring; it had pumped in education to create an elite without responsibilities; it had accepted, in noble, high conscience, the revolution of civil rights -- but dumped its burdens on cities unable to sustain the burden; it had liberalized the immigration laws of the country -- and overwhelmed, with a new absorption problem, cities already strained to the breaking point by the civil-rights revolution.

Arguably those continuing failures have given me no end of work to do, whethe it's squandering the victory dividend, the failure of the Great Society, urban renewal and expressways, the unsustainable suburban experiment, and the positional arms race generating credentialed people who never learned how not to be stupid about being smart.

But Mr White was not done seeing the ominous signs.  Here's page 33, which might have been accurate fifty years ago, but the victims' revolution was gaining traction.

From the founding of the country on, the central instinct and pride of the American liberal has been to keep opportunity for individuals open.  For two centuries the wars of American liberals -- against King George, against the banks, against the slaveholders, against the railways, against the trusts, against the bosses  -- have reflected a doctrine which is more than politics, a doctrine which is of the essence of the culture of the nation:  No man must be locked into or hammered into a category from which he has no opportunity to escape.  He must not be locked in by the color of his skin or his racial genes; he must not be locked in by lack of educational opportunity; he must not be locked in by birth, or parentage, or age or poverty.

Then came the 1972 rules on the composition of state delegations at the Democrats' nominating convention.

By insisting on a fixed proportion of youth, for example, and ignoring a fixed proportion of the elderly, it excluded the old.  By insisting on a fixed proportion of blacks, Indians, or Spanish-speaking and ignoring, say, Italians, Poles, Irish, Jews, old-stock colonials, it restricted.  It restricted for the highest of moral purposes buttressed by the history of the previous decade.

In so doing, that gave populists from George Wallace to Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump an opening.

Somehow, by the end of the sixties these programs had themselves become values.  However much the real world might fear liberal programs, it must submit because programs were morality, even after programs had gone wrong in visible practice.

These days, the Jarrett regency would like to obtain that sort of deference, when the incompetence that is their diversity is on plain view.

Too late, and did Mr White anticipate as much at page 364.

On the long march of the American people to the uplands, most have usually been willing to go along so long as they feel that they or their children will not be discarded, or crushed, or sacrificed in the journey; they will follow as long as they feel those at the head of the march have a competence, a skill, a practical understanding of affairs which touch their lives.  At Miami the music began to frighen people.

If the class dimensions of Selective Service weren't enough, perhaps the corona tyranny and the online schooling kids were getting is.

It's fitting, I suppose, that one Joseph Biden, who benefitted from Richard Nixon's short coat-tails, might end up holding the bag for those McGovernite nostrums.