Facing facts and restoring the country
Though the blog is still on hiatus, the restless stream of history continues to flow. To where? Nobody knows.
Pondering the fitful rush and gurgle of the stream, one finds Robert D. Novak’s bittersweet article Monday last week edifying food for thought. Mr. Novak writes,
On Monday morning May 13, 1957, I entered the Washington bureau of the Associated Press in the old Evening Star building on Pennsylvania Avenue, a 26-year-old reporter transferred from Indianapolis where I had reported on the Indiana legislature for the AP….
[Washington was the capital of a kinder, gentler nation] a half century ago. Then, as now, a Congress controlled by Democrats with a one-vote margin in the Senate confronted a Republican president. But they opposed each other courteously in 1957. I had arrived in Washington in a pause preceding party polarization, the civil rights revolution, racial riots, student unrest, assassinations, two impeachment proceedings, Vietnam, Watergate and Iraq.
Washington then was still the town of Southern efficiency and Northern charm, shabby and not resembling today’s sleek metropolis. The government was much smaller and far less intrusive….
The biggest news of my first week was LBJ leading the Senate on Wednesday to cut $102 million in foreign propaganda funds from the Eisenhower budget. Senate Minority Leader William Knowland and others in the Republican leadership supported the president in principle but voted for Appropriations Committee cuts in the interest of Senate solidarity.
On Tuesday night, Eisenhower over national television had called the cuts a “needless gamble” with national security. But in his weekly press conference on Wednesday, the president rejected going over Knowland’s head to 14 liberal Republican senators who supported Eisenhower, asserting he would work only through the GOP’s “elected leadership.” After the press conference, it was announced that Ike went golfing at the all-male Burning Tree Club with his son John and press secretary James C. Hagerty….
That was the tone of Washington when I arrived. Today the city is slicker, the nation is richer and minorities are protected. But I personally cannot help feeling nostalgia for the civility and even innocence I encountered 50 years ago.
One suspects that most pre-1965 Americans broadly share Mr. Novak’s sentiments and misgivings—or, if they are younger, have older relatives who do. I could be wrong about this, but I doubt it. America is a great and prosperous country, but though even more prosperous today than fifty years ago, she seems far less good. Some important element of American civilization has been badly damaged, and it is not easy to see how to fix it.
There is a sense of helplessness, as though the country where going more and more wrong and there were nothing one could do to right her. In October 2005 Peggy Noonan wrote,
I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it’s a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with “right track” and “wrong track” but missing the number of people who think the answer to “How are things going in America?” is “Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.”…
I believe there’s a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming….
Yes, that’s it. There is a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming. Miss Noonan continues,
A few weeks ago I was chatting with friends about the sheer number of things parents now buy for teenage girls—bags and earrings and shoes. When I was young we didn’t wear earrings, but if we had, everyone would have had a pair or two. I know a 12-year-old with dozens of pairs. They’re thrown all over her desk and bureau. She’s not rich, and they’re inexpensive, but her parents buy her more when she wants them. Someone said, “It’s affluence,” and someone else nodded, but I said, “Yeah, but it’s also the fear parents have that we’re at the end of something, and they want their kids to have good memories. They’re buying them good memories, in this case the joy a kid feels right down to her stomach when the earrings are taken out of the case.”
This, as you can imagine, stopped the flow of conversation for a moment. Then it resumed, as delightful and free flowing as ever. Human beings are resilient. Or at least my friends are, and have to be….
Do people fear the wheels are coming off the trolley? Is this fear widespread? A few weeks ago I was reading Christopher Lawford’s lovely, candid and affectionate remembrance of growing up in a particular time and place with a particular family, the Kennedys, circa roughly 1950-2000. It’s called “Symptoms of Withdrawal.” At the end he quotes his Uncle Teddy. Christopher, Ted Kennedy and a few family members had gathered one night and were having a drink in Mr. Lawford’s mother’s apartment in Manhattan. Teddy was expansive. If he hadn’t gone into politics he would have been an opera singer, he told them, and visited small Italian villages and had pasta every day for lunch. “Singing at la Scala in front of three thousand people throwing flowers at you. Then going out for dinner and having more pasta.” Everyone was laughing. Then, writes Mr. Lawford, Teddy “took a long, slow gulp of his vodka and tonic, thought for a moment, and changed tack. ‘I’m glad I’m not going to be around when you guys are my age.’ I asked him why, and he said, ‘Because when you guys are my age, the whole thing is going to fall apart.’ ”
Mr. Lawford continued, “The statement hung there, suspended in the realm of ‘maybe we shouldn’t go there.’ Nobody wanted to touch it. After a few moments of heavy silence, my uncle moved on.” …
Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.
I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, “I got mine, you get yours.”
You’re a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you’re an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you’re a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, and you’re making your life a little fortress. That’s what I think a lot of the elites are up to.
Miss Noonan’s words, like Mr. Novak’s, come not even from the solid perspective of middle America, but from the rarified air of elite Washington and Manhattan. And still, even they see it.
Some might question whether David Broder were discussing quite the same subject; but I would suggest that, at heart, he was indeed discussing it when in September 2005 he wrote,
The warning signs of impending economic calamity are every bit as evident as the forecasts of ruin for New Orleans when a major hurricane hit.
The runaway budget deficits are compounded by the persistent and growing imbalance in our trade accounts—jeopardizing the inflow of foreign funds we have used to finance our debt.
At a private dinner the other evening where many of the men and women who have steered economic and fiscal policy during the past two decades were expressing their alarm about this situation, one speaker summarized the feelings of the group:
“I think it’s 1925,” he said, “and we’re headed for 1929.”
The year 1929, which all readers over a certain age will instantly recognize, is the year the Great Depression first struck.
None of the three people I have quoted is a prophet. Each of them has a gift for writing but you and I should not impute to any of them any particular, special wisdom. What they have in common is that they are white Americans old enough to remember, quite clearly, what life in America used to be like. The point is that people of that age—you know them and I do, too—share the same, regretful sentiment: in Jack Nicholson’s 1969 words, “You know, this used to be a [tremendously] good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.”
* * *
So, what’s gone wrong with it?
Nothing prevents us from giving the question any of several mostly useless—but comfortable, conventional, permissible—answers. However, if the country has gone seriously wrong, and if this matters, then the question is worth treating with respect, without hypocrisy. We cannot hope to fix the problem if we ignore the principal factors which might be causing it. Perverse modern liberalism has declared certain factors taboo, fencing them off as undiscussable, sacrosanct—like the child who has hidden something and lets you search for it everywhere but under his blanket: “don’t look there,” he says. I for one suspect that the answer lies under the blanket.
Very well. Let us lift the corner of the blanket, and look. Since 1965:
- Non-European and/or non-Judeo-Christian immigrants have come in the millions—indeed, in the tens of millions.
- For the first time in U.S. history, the society has failed effectively to demand that immigrants adopt the English language.
- The country has adopted an extensive welfare state.
- Birth control has grown easy in America. Abortion has grown widespread.
- American society has trodden the institution of marriage in the mud.
- Millions of American blacks have reverted toward violent, prehistoric barbarism.
- Tens of millions of American whites have developed and indulged an inexplicable, perverse, general hatred for Christianity and western civilization.
One does not doubt that some readers will find a nonsequitur or two there; but surely few thoughtful readers of conservative temperament could find the seven points more wrong than right. In 1965 or 1975, maybe even 1985, we had excuse to misunderstand the nature and causes of American decline, but not today—not after all that has happened. We continue to ignore what lies under the blanket at our children’s peril.
The time has come to look under the blanket. Liberal convention demands outrage from you and me when someone smokes a cigarette in the building, but blindness to the utter twistedness of the situation when a woman coworker in the same building has to leave work early to pick her sick child up from day care. Liberal convention demands anger from you and me when a white cop harasses a young black man for “driving while black,” but quiet acceptance of the fact that Americans have abandoned to violent black criminals—and to strange-seeming immigrants—the great, once gleaming American cities our own forefathers built. Surely no one should be forced to breathe someone else’s cigarette smoke or be harassed by the law on account of race, but something sinister is going on here. There is a complete, total lack of proper perspective. If any reader really does not think that
- halting or severely limiting future immigration,
- making life in America untenable for present immigrants who do not adopt English as their first language,
- cancelling the post-1965 welfare state,
- banning abortion and restigmatizing birth control,
- rebalancing traditional sex roles and reviving reverence for traditional marriage,
- rigorously enforcing law and order in the black inner cities, and
- winning back the love and loyalty of liberal American whites toward Christianity and western civilization
would put America firmly back on the path to restored greatness, then one must infer either that modern liberal propaganda continues to daunt that reader, or that he simply does not share this writer’s view of reality.
Few if any of us want to believe that our lives will be different and worse after a white neighbor sells his house to an immigrant from Timbuktuistan. Few if any of us want to believe that the breaking of southern segregation has helped to destroy the black family and to create the vast, violent, urban black predator underclass. Few if any of us want to believe that our lavish, generous welfare programs in the long run tend to foster the very social syndromes they were meant to eradicate. Past some point, however, reality intrudes upon illusions. You may have a slightly different estimate of reality than I do. That’s fine. But, broadly speaking, if you look under the blanket and report without hypocrisy what you see, I think that you will agree that most or all of the points listed are essential for America to address.
Admittedly—though virtually all American liberals are complicit in the disaster—some recent immigrants, many blacks, and most other Americans are not individually responsible for it. Life is complicated, and the reasons our nation has arrived at her present pass are no less complicated. A few special villains like Mr. Kennedy deserve special recognition, maybe; but, broadly speaking, fruitless recriminations aren’t going to save our country now. If you happen to be a young father or mother today whose own parents raised him or her in day-care, if you feel that mom and dad loved you and did the best they could in a confusing world, then you are almost certainly right. On the other hand, if you are older and your kids are already grown, if you are now at the peak of your power and career, then there is so much good that you could do from this time forward that it would be criminal for you to waste your energies on regrets for the past. Save the regrets for twenty years from now, when you sit feeble in your chair. Today you have work to do. Far too many of us, not least this writer, were complicit in the error. However, we are all responsible—you and I—if, for the petty fear of being labeled racists or sexists or fascists or whatever, we refuse to own up to the problem even today.
Remember where Mr. Kennedy left it: “Maybe we shouldn’t go there.” Well, maybe we should.
The quiet but great faith-based organization Alcoholics Anonymous promotes twelve steps toward recovery from alcoholism. The first step of the twelve is to confess the problem. So it is with America today. Though restoring the essential elements of the good America of the 1950s cannot solve all of America’s troubles, that America was the best and finest country the world had ever seen. The bad America of today is, comparatively, a dysfunctional wreck—and we all know it. The clearest way forward for America lies approximately along the path back whence we came. It will be a long, hard trek, but the path is clearly marked. Let us begin forthwith.
HJH