Good-bye, 2023

As the year 2023 passes into history, most Americans are happy to see it go. Despite the best efforts of our public intellectuals turned propagandists, the American citizenry thinks that Anno Domini 2023 was a bad year indeed. 

Naturally, those who believe most fervently in democracy, especially in the will of the majority, will tell you that in this case the majority is wrong, that it holds a skewed vision of the year that is now passing.

Truth be told, one can make a case for the notion that 2023 was not such a bad year at all. In fact, one might argue that it was a good year-- unless your name was Joe Biden, of course. 

The problem is simple. If you are in charge of the country or a company, and if you had a bad year, you are, ipso facto, responsible. You will need to admit that you messed up. 

In some cases you will be required to change policy. In other cases you might even need to fall on your sword.

Anyway, cognitive therapists have taught us that it is downright unhealthy-- mentally speaking-- if we just see the dark side. We need to balance light and dark, good and bad, positive and negative.

For that reason, we are going to devote this column, and probably only this column, to the case for optimism. A commentator like Zachary Karabell might not be an aspiring flack, beholden to the party line, but he still presents the Biden administration case-- that is, it’s a lot better than you think.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Karabell begins with a pro forma description of everything that has gone wrong, and follows it with a paean to a weight-loss drug, Ozempic.

A world where there is less obesity will be a world of more resilient bodies and bones and less diabetes, which alone is the eighth leading cause of early death in the U.S. It’s no accident that the stock price of companies that make artificial joints and insulin delivery systems took a hit this year. For the preponderance of our history on the planet, humans suffered from caloric scarcity; now, we are suffering from caloric abundance. And now, as is so often the case, we are creating solutions to problems we created.

Neither I nor Karabell has sufficient mastery of biochemistry to predict the ultimate impact of Ozempic. Among the recognized side-effects of taking this wonder drug are: nausea, diarrhea, vomiting and constipation. Those are the effects that the manufacturer admits. 

Frankly, I would feel much, much better if American citizens managed to control their appetites, without a drug whose long term impact is still shrouded in mystery. Ozempic allows us to avoid discipline, and this does not seem to me to be an unalloyed good.

As a sidelight, which may or may not be apposite, studies have discovered that weight-loss surgery, while it does reduce obesity, does not improve mental health.

After Ozempic, Karabell lists the highly dubious fact that the crime rate is going down. Dare I say that this is highly controversial. We might consider that our district attorneys have jiggered the crime rate by decriminalizing much of what would normally count as crime. 

This is not so much a statistical anomaly or an instance of the horror that Benjamin Disraeli once denounced when he said that there are lies, damn lies and statistics.

Retail theft by gangs of itinerant youth has caused stores to close, has caused prices to increase and has created empty storefronts on main streets and malls across America.

Everyone’s lived experience, to coin a phrase, says that crime is anything but declining.

After paying lip service to our efforts to save  the climate, the planet and the environment, Karabell jumps to the obvious point, namely that we avoided an economic recession in 2023.

True enough, we did not have a recession, but that does not mean that we are not going to have one next year. We might well have learned to postpone the inevitable, but, if the man on the street thinks that the economy sucks, the chances are good that the economy sucks.

While the numbers and Karabell pooh-pooh inflation, the average citizen suffers from it. Naturally, the trend is downward, but that does not mean that the trend will continue downward.

Of course, Karabell touts the vigorous stock market. If you were in the right seven stocks you made a lot of money in 2023.

Of course, history tells us that what the stock market giveth the stock market also taketh away. Let’s not be too cocky about all of this.

Besides, Karabell merely pays lip service to the wars that are ongoing in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. He ignores the singular ineptitude of the Biden presidency. And he pays nothing more than lip service to the millions of illiterate and innumerate peasants who are invading our nation. If this is the best of all possible worlds, we are in deep doodoo.

To be fair and balanced, Daniel Henninger offers a contrary take on 2023 in the same Wall Street Journal:

In the old one now being swept into the dustbin of history, the presidency reached its sell-by date, Congress was dysfunctional, food prices rose, urban crime spread, the border collapsed, and Jimmy Buffett died.

Now, Henninger finds something positive in it all. He explains that 2023 was the year most people woke up to the abysmal failure that is the American educational system. The failure of school teachers to prepare children for life outside of the classroom was made manifest in the evident idiocy of America’s college students. 

He writes:

The silver lining in 2023’s endless cloud is that this was the year the scales fell from most people’s eyes about the realities of American education, from kindergarten through graduate school. On balance, this is a good-news story. U.S. education needed fixing but like most aging infrastructure, no real fix was likely absent the forcing lever of calamity.

And then, Joshua Chaffin, columnist for the Financial Times, finds some good news in the apparent decline and fall of wokery.

When the champions of wokery appeared en masse in America’s streets calling for the blood of Jews, when it embraced Hamas as liberators, it showed its true face, and a very ugly face it was.

For me, what truly shattered the woke move­ment was Hamas’s Octo­ber 7 attack on Israel — and the aston­ish­ing images of stu­dents and act­iv­ists either jus­ti­fy­ing the slaughter of inno­cents or find­ing ways to con­demn Israel before it had yet dropped a bomb. (It has since dropped many, with the Gaza death toll reach­ing 20,000, accord­ing to offi­cials in the Hamas-run ter­rit­ory.) The prob­lem, say crit­ics, is that the woke con­cep­tion of the world — obsessed by sys­tems and iden­tity — mis­handles Jews and Israelis. It tends to cast them as wealthy “white oppress­ors”, and so can­not see them as vic­tims.

In my ultra-pro­gress­ive sub­urb, where people plant signs on their front lawns advert­ising the many hatreds they oppose, fel­low Jews have been startled by the lack of solid­ar­ity from groups they have sup­por­ted in the past. To them, and now me, the woke ban­ner we marched under a few years ago feels hol­low, even hypo­crit­ical.

Jews had fought for the civil rights of minorities only to discover that these same minorities hated them. Call them naive. But, for many it came as a shock.

For many of our bien pensant intellectuals, it came as something of a shock to discover that Jews belonged to the oppressor class and thus deserved to be murdered, raped and mutilated. 

One recalls the time, over three decades ago, when college professors, champions of deconstruction, discovered, to their chagrin, that their new method was really recycled Nazi practice. Deconstruction was a fancy term for pogrom.

So, they decided, en masse, to become champions of anti-colonialist studies. How could they have imagined that these studies would lead them to despise Israel? 

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or (preferably) for a fee.