I’ve long been fascinated by institutions in and after decline. In the summer of 1977, not yet 13, I was staying with family friends in Puerto Rico, my first trip without my parents. While I was there, The New York Times ran an article about San Juan’s once-prestigious Normandie Hotel, a magnet for socialites in the 1940s but later a brothel and then defunct. I was intrigued, and as the Normandie was near the Caribe Hilton, where we were one day, crossed the street for a look at the old building, designed as a replica of a cruise ship. It was locked, with a paper taped to its door. Sometimes, when I think of once-great organizations fallen into ruin, I remember the darkened windows of that whorehouse.
In the 1980s, I showed a friend from Puerto Rico around Manhattan. I pointed out the sculpture of Prometheus at the Rockefeller Center skating rink, telling my Catholic friend that this was the titan who’d stolen fire from “los dios,” as I put it, incorrectly mixing the plural definite article with the singular “god.” “Los dioses,” he corrected me. I also told him about a businessman who’d impressively refurbished Wollman Rink, in Central Park, cutting through the public-sector red tape. Around the same time, I read Trump: The Saga of America’s Most Powerful Real Estate Baron, by the libertarian writer Jerome Tuccille, a biography that presented its subject in generally favorable terms, though with qualms about how his real estate development depended heavily on government connections and favors.
If I’d picked up a novel, as a Republican in the 1980s, depicting a future in which Donald Trump would someday, as a Republican president, take an attitude toward aiding distressed areas, such as Puerto Rico after a hurricane, where he’d throw paper towels at a crowd, or California amid wildfires, based on whether people in those places supported him; or that he’d speak of foreign dictators in glowing terms and meet with a Russian leader with no aides present; or that he’d exhort a crowd to “fight like hell” at the Capitol as Congress convened to tally electoral votes of an election he’d lost, or that four years later the GOP primary voters would return him as nominee, with significant prospects of regaining power while threatening to unleash the military on “the enemy within,” identified as Democratic leaders—I’d have dismissed that novel as a potboiler sketching out a ludicrously tendentious anti-Republican vision.
If that preposterous novel had depicted Republican senators like Mitch McConnell, after the Capitol was attacked, raging against Trump, but declining to convict him on impeachment charges and therefore not barring him from future federal office, and later endorsing his re-election effort, I’d have balked at the plausibility of a scenario in which the party I favored had fallen into such disrepair. My mind’s eye would’ve flickered across the Normandie Hotel and then the ruins of the Roman Forum. I’d have recalled, from Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, how Rome’s senators had lost power and autonomy to the dictatorial emperors, and I’d have dismissed as absurd that such history could re-occur in America.
I went to Puerto Rico many times in my youth. One year I was there before and during a big tropical storm. I recall lounging on the beach on a sunny day at the Caribe Hilton while clouds gathered on the horizons in all directions. That day’s long been a metaphor for me about how one can feel complacent, or only gradually become concerned, about dangers that are in plain sight but haven’t hit yet. “The island is trashed,” a friend from Puerto Rico told me around the end of the Trump presidency, referring to damage from the 2017 hurricanes Irma and Maria that hadn’t been repaired a few years later.
My last time in Puerto Rico was in the early-1990s. I was reading The Dream and the Nightmare, by the conservative writer Myron Magnet, whom I then interviewed back in New York and wrote about for Insight on the News. I went on to write for City Journal, where Magnet became editor, then a conservative magazine with influence across a large swath of the political spectrum. In recent years, I’ve been shocked at how bad City Journal’s become, such as in an article that evoked Friedrich Nietzsche as a guide for “God-fearing Americans” to defend religion against the “ascetic ideal” of wokeness, without mentioning that this ideal was central to the atheistic philosopher’s condemnation of Christianity. When the right’s prestige publications are that fatuous, there’s little hope for a conservative intellectual revival.
—Follow Kenneth Silber on Twitter: @kennethsilber