Why Senator Warren disappoints me
The last time I was represented in Congress by a senator I admired was in the 1980s, during my first few years in Boston. The junior senator from Massachusetts was Paul Tsongas, a liberal Democrat from Lowell. I was neither a liberal nor a Democrat — like most younger voters then, I supported Ronald Reagan (yes, most: You can look it up) — and I didn't share many of Tsongas's political stands. But I liked his style. He was thoughtful and self-deprecating and not arrogant; he seemed willing to consider the opinions of others and to acknowledge when his judgment had been wrong. In a city and a profession filled with arrogant partisans, he wasn't blind to his own party's shortcomings. Indeed, he sought to correct them.
In perhaps his most famous speech, Tsongas addressed the national convention of Americans for Democratic Action on June 14, 1980. The ADA has faded from view now, but in those days it was an influential organization that stood for unabashed New Deal liberalism and worked steadily to push the Democratic Party to the left. Tsongas was just a freshman senator with little seniority on Capitol Hill, while the other senator from Massachusetts was the far more influential Ted Kennedy, whose insurgent campaign for president that year had just moments earlier been wildly cheered by the ADA delegates.
So it took a measure of guts for Tsongas to deliver the blunt message he had come that day to share: that Kennedy-style liberalism wasn't working.
"Fewer young people are joining the liberal cause in 1980 than in the 1960s," he warned. "Liberalism is at a crossroads. It will either evolve to meet the issues of the 1980s or it will be reduced to an interesting topic for PhD-writing historians."
 Paul Tsongas brought intellectual honesty and a measure of self-deprecation to his job as US senator. |
The delegates' reaction, he later noted dryly, was not exactly an ovation. But his purpose that day wasn't to be lauded. It was to be heard.
"Liberalism must extricate itself from the 1960s," Tsongas said. "We must move on to the pressing problems of the 1980s, and we must have answers that seem relevant." Americans are frustrated, he said, and "many are looking to Ronald Reagan for leadership."
Reaction to the speech was intense. Hard-core liberals accused Tsongas of selling out, or of betraying his senior Senate colleague. But from younger liberals and moderate Democrats came a deluge of praise, and thousands of requests for copies of his speech. Then-Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York pronounced it the best address delivered to an ADA gathering since his own in 1967. A year later, the speech was expanded into a widely praised book, The Road From Here.
The junior senator from Massachusetts turned out to be right. The Democrats lost the White House that November and 12 years would elapse before they regained it. Tsongas himself, facing a battle with cancer, retired from the Senate after the 1984 election. He died of lymphoma in 1997 at the age of 55.
Why can't Massachusetts elect more Democrats like Tsongas? I don't mean Democrats who describe themselves as neoliberals, though that wouldn't be so bad. I mean Democrats who are willing to challenge their party's knee-jerk verities, who aren't locked into an ideological straitjacket, who are more interested in governing well than in scoring meretricious debaters' points.
Democrats, in other words, who aren't like Elizabeth Warren.
In general I have a low opinion of politicians, most of whom strike me as cunning but not contemplative — far more focused on chasing popularity than on shaping careful public policy. The other senator from Massachusetts, Ed Markey, seems to me to be that sort. I generally don't like or agree with the things he says and does, but I also don't expect more from him.
But it's different with Warren. Before she entered Congress, she was nothing like the snide left-wing propagandist she is today. Certainly she was a liberal, but she didn't treat all private enterprise and successful businesses as slimy lowlifes, guilty until proven innocent. Back then, she wasn't seeking a reputation for herself as an avenging hard-left crusader, quick to eviscerate any Republican or conservative with a difference of opinion.
Read The Two-Income Trap, the interesting and judicious book about economic insecurity that Warren co-wrote with her daughter in 2004, and you encounter someone who was thinking about important social issues in ways that didn't line up neatly with the usual left- and right-wing shibboleths. For example, she endorsed school choice, arguing that parents should be given vouchers to enable them to send their children to schools anywhere in a district. She pointed out that the migration of women into the workforce that began in the 1970s had come with significant downsides for their families ("They saw the rewards a working mother could bring, without seeing the risks associated with that newfound income. . . . The combination has taken these women out of the home away from their children and simultaneously made family life less, not more, financially secure.")
I realize that political ambition doesn't bring out the best in most people. But once Warren jumped into electoral politics, she seemed to go out of her way to signal that her days of nuance and moderation were over. She advertised herself as a Democrat who could guarantee that there'd be "plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor" in any legislative battle she took on. Before long the law professor and financial expert who thought outside the usual boxes and appealed to more than just her party's true believers was gone. In its place was an ultra-combative ideologue, quick to take offense and fling insults.
To be fair, Warren is hardly the only member of the Senate who is disappointing in this way. The Republican caucus, too, includes members who used to be seen as affable and intellectually impressive, but have transformed themselves into zealous bomb-throwers: Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, for example. But Warren is my senator, which is why I focus on — and am so disappointed in — her. American politics desperately needs leaders who want to cool partisan fevers, who value compromise, who live by the principle that disagreement need not always be disagreeable. Warren could have been such a leader, but chose to go in a different direction.
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The gift of giving
"A religious holiday has become an occasion for shopping sales and watching holiday specials on TV, and nearly half of Americans think stores start the Christmas season too soon," the Rasmussen polling firm reported on Dec. 15. According to its latest online survey, 62 percent of American adults believe that Christmas is "over-commercialized."
Rasmussen's numbers (like all poll findings) should be taken with a grain of salt. But there certainly are any number of scolds whose annual holiday traditions include bewailing how crass and mercenary Christmas has become. In an essay this month, Declan Leary of The American Conservative decried "the entire Santa Claus Industrial Complex" and "the reduction of the incarnation of the Creator of the universe to a cheap commercial jubilee." Writing in Politico, Derek Robertson blamed corporations for yielding to their "obvious interest in making the holidays more garishly commercial each year."
This tsk-tsking begins every November when Santa starts showing up in TV commercials and the malls are suddenly festooned with wreaths and candy canes. The laments grow louder during the frenetic shopping spree that runs from Black Friday through Cyber Monday. For some people, nothing expresses the Christmas spirit like faulting Americans for spending too much money on gifts and blaming businesses for selling them.
On Christmas Day, the Boston Globe published a terrific column by my colleague Marcela García, who took dead aim at that scorn for the season's materialism. Far from regarding gift-giving as a corruption of the holiday, she embraced its power to enhance and elevate the Christmas spirit:
[A]s millions scramble and sweat for last-minute Christmas presents, some feeling hopelessly coerced and anxious, and the calls grow for rejecting the ritual of gift-giving during the holidays as an outdated practice, I'm at the top of my game, spirits high on the hunt. My husband calls me the gift ninja. I'm a devoted gift-giver. And maybe I'm part elf.
I see deep symbolism behind the shopping and the giving. And to me, those who denounce Christmas gift-giving are missing its whole point: Figuring out what a person would appreciate as a gift is a way of creating a unique connection with the recipient, making space for gratitude and joy. It's why I consider gift-giving a love language. "Here, I bought this for you." (I love you.)
Just so. Gift-giving as a language of love is the theme of some of the most beloved Christmas literature in the American canon, from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women ("'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,' grumbled Jo, lying on the rug") to O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi ("Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are the most wise"). Would those who seethe at the national obsession with buying presents at this time of year really prefer to live in a country that didn't have a special time in which gift-giving figured prominently? Would society be improved, in their view, if November and December came and went and the impulse to bring joy to friends and family had simply vanished?
There are, Lord knows, plenty of things wrong with the society we live in. But the national drive to spread happiness via holiday gift-giving isn't one of them. On the contrary, I think it is one of our culture's most endearing and heartening traits.
I once wrote about the experience of taking my 8-year-old son to a local dollar store so that he could spend his savings — "11 dollars and change, grubbily folded into a miniature wallet" — on Chanukah gifts for his family:
We had done this together last year, and Micah had been besieging me to pick an evening when the two of us could make a return trip.
I found it a wonderful experience, no irony intended. Dollar Tree isn't exactly Tiffany & Co., and in any case Micah chooses gifts with all the sophistication and refinement you'd expect from a rambunctious third-grade boy who loves bugs and can never seem to keep his shirt tucked in. The presents he picked out for his mother included a desktop picture frame for her office, glow-in-the-dark necklaces ("Mama can wear them if she goes for a walk at night"), and two boxes of Milk Duds; for his teen-age brother he found an air horn, Lemonheads, and a container of "noise putty" that emits flatulent sounds when poked. A devotee of Martha Stewart Living the kid is not.
But whatever Micah may have lacked in style and taste, he more than made up for with the unfeigned delight he brought to the whole project. He couldn't wait to turn his little clutch of dollars into presents for the people he loves. He wasn't consciously trying to be altruistic or selfless; and he's never given 30 seconds' thought to the meaning of generosity. He was simply excited by the prospect of giving — and indeed, when the moment came a few nights later to bestow his gifts on his recipients, he was practically bouncing up and down with elation.
If this is crass commercialism, let's have more of it.
Granted, anything can be overdone, and materialism is no exception. But the old wisdom is as true today as it ever was: It is more blessed to give than to receive.
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"As soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on" — Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891)
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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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