The Value of Years Spent Thinking

When each issue of Forbes magazine arrives, I always look to see if the "Thought Leaders: Current Events" column for that issue has been penned by the eminent British historian Paul Johnson. He is one of four international leader-scholars who alternate in writing the column.

Paul Johnson was born in 1928 and has authored more than 40 books. So he has had time, and has taken opportunity, to evaluate a lot in his lifetime. Schooled first as a Jesuit (i.e., conservative), he graduated from Oxford and became a left-leaning liberal in his early public years. Obviously, the fact that he writes for Forbes means he jettisoned his liberal views and returned to conservatism: "The Left had no answers," he said. Through the years, he has given his critics plenty to swipe at, both politically and personally. Given that there are no perfect observers of the world condition, I still value the 83-year-old perspective of one who has witnessed the perturbations of Western Civilization from both sides of the Atlantic from first a liberal, and now a conservative, point of view.

All that by way of introduction—to provide weight to the following words of his from his current Forbes column, "Thank God: An American Recovery." Concerning what he sees as a growing economic recovery in America . . .

President Obama can take no credit whatsoever for this. Nothing he's done has promoted growth, and his actions may even have held it back somewhat. Fortunately his presidency has been so weak, his hesitations so various and prolonged and his changes of mind so frequent that the White House's actual impact on the workings of the economy has been trifling. Had Mr. Obama been a stronger and more determined man, it's likely that, given his views, his interventions would have been destructive, and the U.S. economy would now be in dire distress. The inactivity—or impotence—of the White House is thus, for once, welcome.

And concerning the possibility of recovery in Europe . . .

The danger [in Europe] is that one of the EU's members will freely choose a government that then opts for a nondemocratic solution in bringing unemployment down sharply and rapidly. This is, of course, exactly what happened when Adolf Hitler came to power in the 1930s. Mass unemployment killed the [pre-Hitler] Weimar Republic, but Hitler's policies of public works and rearmament restored full employment to Germany, the only country in the 1930s where this happened.

How is that America elected a young man as president who couldn't possibly have a sufficient view of the grand sweep of history, either through intellectual study or simply the passing of years? I would vote for a Constitutional amendment that says U.S. presidents have to be at least 65 years of age, etc. etc. The Bible calls leaders "elders" for a reason.

When it comes to the "ten year rule" of domain mastery (Harvard's Howard Gardner in Creative Minds), Paul Johnson qualifies in spades. Our current president? He simply hasn't put in the years. And it shows.