by Barry Goldman
I was 20-something and fresh out of law school in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected. Like the rest of my demographic, I was morbidly depressed about it. So it was meaningful for me when I saw the Weavers’ movie Wasn’t That a Time and heard the great Lee Hays say:
We have a thought for the year. We’ve been around long enough to tell you: Be of good cheer. This too will pass. I’ve had kidney stones and I know.
The Weavers had been hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted by the industry. Hays was an alcoholic, a diabetic double amputee, and he would die within months. Kids like me were all bent out of shape about the Reagan ascendency. But old hands like Hays had seen far worse. He wasn’t going to let a simple-minded B-actor like Reagan freak him out. I aspired to that kind of equanimity.
Around the same time, I sat in on a political science lecture by a professor who had been a foreign service officer. He must have been significantly younger than I am now, but he seemed grizzled to me at the time. He said all revolutionary movements are essentially utopian. The central idea is that there is a madman at the wheel. If we could just knock out the madman and grab the wheel, we could steer to safety. He said, sadly, this is a juvenile fantasy. The bitter truth, he told us, is there is no madman. And there is no wheel.
The world is much more complicated than the slogans of the revolutionaries would have it. There are no simple solutions. There are not even any simple problems.
Worse, the idea that there are simple solutions leads inevitably to fanaticism. The notion that there is a simple truth, we know it, and that guy over there is preventing us from reaching it, leads us to excuse pushing that guy out of the way.
Isaiah Berlin, another wise old man, said so:
We must weigh and measure, bargain, compromise, and prevent the crushing of one form of life by its rivals. I know only too well that this is not a flag under which idealistic and enthusiastic young men and women may wish to march—it seems too tame, too reasonable, too bourgeois, it does not engage the generous emotions. But you must believe me, one cannot have everything one wants—not only in practice, but even in theory. The denial of this, the search for a single, overarching ideal because it is the one and only true one for humanity, invariably leads to coercion. And then to destruction, blood—eggs are broken, but the omelette is not in sight, there is only an infinite number of eggs, human lives, ready for the breaking. And in the end the passionate idealists forget the omelette, and just go on breaking eggs.
I have believed this for decades. It is a central pillar of my understanding of the world. I tell the madman at the wheel story and quote that old professor at the slightest provocation. Here, for example, I used it to explain the Detroit bankruptcy. The same for the Lee Hays line about kidney stones. I used it when George W. Bush was elected, and even when Trump got in the first time.
In my professional life I am an arbitrator and mediator. I am in the business of getting disputing parties to listen to each other, find common ground, and negotiate settlements. I’ve written two books on the subject. I teach it to law students and graduate students. I’ve travelled around the US and Canada giving talks to bar associations and alternative dispute resolution organizations. There are two sides to every story, I say. Listen to the other side, I say, Audi alteram partem. Let us reason together, I say. You can’t settle lawsuits unless you listen to the people on the other side with respect and consider how the case looks from their point of view.
I have always been proud of the mature sophistication of my understanding. The world is complicated. Nothing is simple.
Yeah, well, sometimes that’s just not true. When French Prime Minister Clemenceau was asked how history would remember the start of World War I, he said, “One thing is for certain: they will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.”
Just so. At some point, you just have to say, as ee cummings did, “There is some shit I will not eat.” There can be no respectful listening to the other side when the other side says children shouldn’t be vaccinated for polio, or January 6th was a day of love, or Ukraine “got in a war.” Ukraine did not get in a war. Ukraine was attacked by a murderous dictator. RFK Jr. is a dangerous crank. Elon Musk has no business mucking around in the Treasury Department computer system. There is no such thing as the Gulf of America.
So I have changed my mind. I do so with the greatest reluctance. It goes against everything I’ve been saying for nearly 50 years. But the facts have changed. And “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
The time for politics as usual has passed. We are in the midst of a coup. The Constitution is in danger. Democracy and the rule of law are at stake. There is a madman at the wheel.
THERE IS A MADMAN AT THE WHEEL!
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