Pragmatism Gives Way to Magical Thinking

Cataclysmic events just prior to Succos awaken us to the constant need for the Divine protection, of which the succah is the preeminent symbol. The outbreak of the Second Intifada just before Rosh Hashanah of 5761/2000; the felling of the Twin Towers on 9/11 the next year; and last year’s panicked American flight from Afghanistan, while abandoning thousands of Afghanis who aided America to their fate at the hands of the Taliban, which seemed to many to signal the end of America’s world leadership, are examples of the phenomenon.

I don’t anticipate any such events this year — one never does. The Russian invasion of Ukraine certainly qualifies as an earth-shattering event, a reversion to a world order long thought buried in which large, military powerful nations invade their neighbors on the slightest of pretexts and, having failed on the military front, don’t hesitate to launch direct and undisguised attacks on civilian populations. The consequences of that invasion will have immense impact on the entire world for years to come in terms of shortages of basic food stuffs and critical energy supplies. And it has formally cemented a new “axis of evil” in the form of an alliance between China, Russia, and Iran. But the fighting in Ukraine has been ongoing for eight months, and is thus not proper fodder for a pre-Succos column.

MY CURRENT DISQUIETUDE, however, derives less from any specific event than from a general sense that the vast majority of world leaders, including our own, have little grasp of the issues that will confront the citizens whom they purport to lead in the future, and little interest in the details of public policy. Think for a moment what it means that in a nation of over 330 million souls, Joe Biden and Donald Trump were the two candidates for president in 2020, and that both are chafing for a rematch in 2024 — and, unbelievably, might get it.

Those concerns about the current state of world leadership were triggered by an editorial in the Wall Street Journal by Mitch Daniels, former Republican governor of Indiana and currently the president of Purdue University. Daniels’s subject was President Biden’s college debt forgiveness. A large part of the justification for that forgiveness was the skyrocketing cost of a university education that has risen faster than any other category in the American economy.