Peggy Noonan Speaks Truth: The Circuits Are Overloaded

Peggy Noonan’s in the Wall Street Journal today with a genuine and useful insight:

Mr. Trump has overloaded all circuits. Everything is too charged, with sparks and small shocks all over. “Nothing feels stable,” I mused to a longtime Washington media figure at a dinner the night before the Prayer Breakfast. “Nothing is stable,” she replied.

Noonan captures here, I think, a truth about the current moment, particularly how it feels. Every night, my wife and I look at each other and ask, How long can this go on. This constant sense of disruption, this sense that every day is a decade, a minute a year.

But stepping back from the feeling of the moment to its politics, I think Noonan is also revealing a truth in spite of herself. For while she insists on distinguishing a conservatism of prudence and care, of caution and slowness, the truth is conservatism is almost always hostile to stability, and often favors overloading all circuits, making everything feel charged.

But it does so—or at least can get away with doing so—in a very specific context: when it is encountering an insurgent movement from below that threatens to overturn long established relations of authority and power. At such moments, rhyme and reason coincide. At such moments, the “generous wildness of Quixotism,” as Burke put it, “the madness of the wise” can seem like the greatest sobriety of all. At such moments, audacity can appear in the cover of prudence, wildness in the garb of caution and care. (Noonan need only read some of the speeches of her hero, Ronald Reagan, to see how skillfully he was able to walk this fine line.)

What Trump is running up against is the fact that we don’t live in such a moment, and the reason we don’t is because the conservative movement has been so successful in defeating the left.

For decades, Trump’s base was ginned up on this lethal cocktail of strategic madness and intelligent wildness, but now it’s late, and the bar is closed. The left has been crushed—even our new progressive insurgencies have a long long way to go before they can generate the kind of panicked genius and intelligent anxiety that traditionally provoke the right—and Quixotism now seems, well, Quixotic; madness, mad.

What was once strategy is now surplus.

And that’s why Peggy Noonan feels like the circuits are overloaded: They are.