I am a confirmed hater of New Year’s Eve parties and a skeptic of New Year’s festivities in general. There is nothing more dispiriting than the spectacle of people pretending to have a good time on New Year’s Eve, except possibly the less crowded tragedy of people pretending to be madly in love on Valentine’s Day.
But I am going to a New Year’s party this year, albeit one hosted by sensible people with a Williamson-friendly disposition: The party starts at 6 p.m., so I expect to be in bed by 9 p.m. That works out well for the babysitter, too: I don’t think her evening plans will get under way until at least 10 p.m. The babysitter seems like a pretty sensible type, too (what other kind do you want minding your children?) and it seems that in the past few years the people in my life have made a noticeable shift in the direction of good sense.
One of my reasons for New Year’s skepticism is that I think it is rare that people actually change very much, but sometimes even a smidgen of betterment can make a big difference. Marriage and having four sons in 19 months has a way of complicating things and simplifying them at the same time: It’s not exactly “Jesus, Take the Wheel,” but I have managed to reorganize some parts of my life (or have them reorganized for me) in a way that has taken a lot of things off the table that had been there longer than they should have been, and, conveniently and happily, this was accomplished without my having to exercise very much virtue at all. Waiting for my virtue to get the better of my inertia is a “long wait for a train don’t come.”
But it has been a good year. I have even managed to keep a couple of this year’s resolutions, for a change, which is to say I lost some weight and didn’t murder anybody. (Yet.) One takes victories where one can. They say that one of the side effects experienced by people using our miraculous new weight loss drugs is hair loss—well, joke’s on you, mofos! For once, I am ahead of the curve. (Of interest: The thinning hair apparently is a result of the weight loss itself, not a result of the drugs per se.) I have a theory that a thinner American may provide a bigger market for more grown-up clothes and perhaps a smaller market for the larger kind of SUVs. It would be too much to hope that the consumer-driven market for GLP-1 drugs—a development that has provided radical health improvements to millions of Americans and that is largely driven by out-of-pocket spending rather than by government programs or employer-provided benefits—will provide a dramatic enough example of what actually works to get the attention of health care reformers. But if anybody is looking for a good example …
The republic may be wobbling under the weight of a blend of autocracy and imbecility that is genuinely unprecedented—unusually, the word is warranted—in American history, but the news has been mostly good at chez Williamson. Because I have the kind of mind I have, that is both a source of joy and a source of anxiety. Janus, the Roman god of the new year, is not the only one who can look in two directions at the same time. There is cause for hope—I know that my Redeemer liveth—but there is cause for the other thing, too, room for that “fear in a handful of dust.”
The people who say that conservatism represents a fearful view of the world are not wrong about that—where they are wrong is in thinking that the fearfulness is unreasonable or unjustified, that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” which was a damned funny thing for Franklin Roosevelt to say in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power. But the face of my fear is not that of any political figure, however poisonous the toads hopping around these fruited plains today may be. The face of my fear is not a new Hitler but the Old Adam. It is the face in the mirror.
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.” So wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a survivor of the better part of a decade in the Soviet gulag for the crime of having privately criticized Joseph Stalin in a personal letter. Franklin Roosevelt may have been a canny politician, but Solzhenitsyn knew things that Roosevelt did not know and could not know—he knew Fear Itself, intimately. The great Russian continues: “This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.” That’s the good news. And then there is the other news: “And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an un-uprooted small corner of evil. Since then, I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.”
It is possible to constrict it: That will be me in 2026. Where bayonets will not get the job done, I will have to take in hand whatever weapon I can to keep Old Adam at bay. He will kill me if he can. On my better days, I start the morning with that in mind.
There is not anything unusual in that: It is the most ordinary thing in the world. The horrors Solzhenitsyn catalogued were not visited upon us by alien conquerors or demonic agents: That is who we are. New Year’s Eve is only a line in time—it is that other line, the one that Solzhenitsyn described, that we have to worry about.
That is largely a private affair, although it does entail some political consequences. In some ways, the events of the past several years have left me with a political sensibility that is less libertarian than it had been, in that I do not believe that Americans are as fit for liberty as I had imagined them to be and believe instead that what they will do with their freedom is less admirable than I had expected it to be. But in other ways, recent history has left me with a more libertarian sensibility: If I am less inclined to trust Americans with liberty than I once was, I am much less inclined to trust them with power. I am not a market utopian, but it seems obvious enough to me that J.D. Vance can do much more harm to the American project and the human race than Jeff Bezos can. The current ghastly and despicable cast of characters who dominate our national life at this moment were not forced upon Americans: They—we—chose this.
And if there is a possible charitable interpretation, it is only that the same fallen nature that leads men and women to personal destruction can lead the best of nations to public forms of destruction, to debasement and disfiguration. Waiting for our national virtue to get the better of our national inertia is … see above.
Yes, yes: Probably they will not be too disappointed that I am leaving the party early. I do not think I have made very many good decisions after 9 p.m.
Good night, friends. And good night, Janus, too—I’ll see you again soon enough.
