It’s hard to contemplate American public life in the 21st century and not arrive at the unhappy conclusion that we are led by idiots. The political class has lately produced an impressive string of debacles: the Afghanistan pullout, urban crime waves, easily foreseen inflation, mayhem at the southern border, a self-generated energy crisis, a pandemic response that wrought little good and vast ruin. Then there are the perennial national embarrassments: a mind-bogglingly expensive welfare state that doesn’t work, public schools that make kids dumber, universities that nurture destructive grievances and noxious ideologies, and a news media nobody trusts.
Readers may object to parts of this list, but few will deny feeling that the country’s government and major institutions are run by people who don’t know what they’re doing. A similar situation obtained seven centuries ago in Europe, as I learned recently from “Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy.” The 2019 book, by Harvard historian James Hankins, is a study of Italian humanist writers and statesmen beginning with Francesco Petrarca (1304-74), known to English speakers as Petrarch. Fourteenth-century humanism arose, Mr. Hankins writes, from a widespread disgust with the venality and incompetence of political and ecclesiastical leaders in late-medieval Italy.