Category Archives: Culture

Another Home Run by Mark Levin

A Review of Mark Levin’s Ameritopia

Mark Levin has knocked it out of the park again. Following his 2009 blockbuster best seller, Liberty and Tyranny, Levin’s latest book, Ameritopia, is another brilliant depiction of the stark differences confronting America as it chooses between liberty and tyranny. Levin’s 2009 book adopted a political/cultural perspective. Through an examination of signature issues – such as the Constitution, federalism, the free market, the welfare state, environmentalism, immigration and faith – Levin explained the disjoint points of view of those who favor liberty as opposed to those who prefer equality, security and “fairness.” He described how the latter inevitably leads to tyranny (following on the ideas of several potent thinkers, most notably, Friedrich Hayek). Not surprisingly, Levin identified those in the former camp as devotees of conservatism, while those in the latter represent liberalism or progressivism or – the more charged term that Levin has helped to popularize – statism.

In his new book, Levin adopts a more philosophical, even spiritual tone. He seeks to identify the underlying philosophy that explains the gravitation of an individual toward either of these epic movements. What fundamental beliefs or inclinations, he asks, impel one to the statist point of view, or alternatively to the viewpoint in which liberty is to be cherished above all else in the political realm? For the former, Levin asserts that the fundamental philosophy that underlies the progressive/statist mindset is utopianism. The statist believes that mankind’s nature is not immutable, but rather perfectible and that society can continuously progress to higher states of equality, fairness and social justice – culminating in a utopian vision of human and societal perfection. This trek must be led by wise experts, embodied in a benevolent, enlightened and extremely powerful government that guides – even if at times, forcefully – the society and its people toward a state of perfection.

Levin identifies four primary sources from which statists derive their utopian inspiration: Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, Thomas Hobbe’s Leviathan and Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. In an amazing tour de force of historical and philosophical analysis, Levin relates the ideas expressed in these four utopian visions to the current thinking of statists such as those that populate the Obama administration.

Those who prize liberty over social progress are not grounded in the ideas of equality, fairness and social justice. Rather they see humans as flawed creatures who over millennia of experimentation have learned through vast experience the best methods to help them achieve a life of freedom, opportunity and prosperity. In particular, they emphasize faith, family, community, impartial rule of law, free enterprise and above all a strictly limited government that rules purely at the consent of the governed and whose primary (and, in some sense, sole) responsibility is to protect the people’s natural rights – which are inalienable and granted by Nature and Nature’s God, not by government.

Levin cites many philosophers who are the source of these ideas – e.g., Edmund Burke, Frédéric Bastiat, William Blackstone, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; but he reserves a special place for Montesquieu, Locke and Tocqueville. Once again, through a brilliant historical analysis, Levin traces how these seminal thinkers and espousers of liberty influenced America’s founding and its history, and how they continue to inspire modern conservatives.

Levin writes with great force, clarity and conviction. Here is just a small sample of some of his most profound comments:

…the individual’s right to live freely and safely and pursue happiness includes the right to benefit from the fruits of his own labor. As the individual’s time on earth is finite, so too is his labor. The illegitimate denial or diminution of his labor – that is, the involuntary deprivation of the private property he accumulates from his intellectual and/or physical efforts – is a form of servitude and, hence, immoral.

…America today is not strictly a constitutional republic, because the Constitution has been and continues to be easily altered by a judicial oligarchy that mostly enforces, if not expands, federal power. It is not strictly a representative republic, because so many edicts are produced by a maze of administrative departments that are unknown to the public and detached from its sentiment. It is not strictly a federal republic, because the states that gave the central government life now live at its behest. America is becoming, and in significant ways has become, a post-constitutional, democratic utopia of sorts. It exists behind a Potemkin-like image of constitutional republicanism. Its essential elements and unique features are being ingurgitated by an insatiable federal government that seeks to usurp and displace the civil society.

The Founders would be appalled at the nature of the federal government’s transmutation and the squandering of the American legacy. The federal government has become the nation’s largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider, and pension guarantor. Its size and reach are vast. Its interventions are illimitable.

[This] is to endorse the magnificence of the American founding. The American founding was an exceptional exercise in collective human virtue and wisdom – a culmination of thousands of years of experience, knowledge, reason and faith. The Declaration of Independence is a remarkable societal proclamation of human rights, brilliant in its insight, clarity and conciseness. The Constitution of the United States is an extraordinary matrix of governmental limits, checks, balances, and divisions, intended to secure for posterity the individual’s sovereignty as proclaimed in the Declaration.

This is the grand heritage to which every American is born. It has been characterized as “the America Dream,” “the American experiment,” and “American exceptionalism.” The country has been called “the Land of Opportunity,” “the Land of Milk and Honey,” and “a Shining City on a Hill.” It seems unimaginable that a people so endowed by Providence, and the beneficiaries of such unparalleled human excellence, would choose or tolerate a course that ensures their own decline and enslavement, for a government unleashed on the civil society is a government that destroys the nature of man.

Levin writes beautifully, but also somewhat pessimistically. He ended the first book with what he called a Conservative Manifesto. This was an ambitious program through which conservatives could recapture the national conversation from the progressive/statist domination under which the USA has suffered for 50-100 years. In fact, Levin outlines scores of concrete steps that he felt needed to be taken not just to control the conversation, but indeed to restore the nation to its founding principles of liberty and thereby prevent the seemingly inexorable slide into a statist tyranny toward which he saw it plunging. He ended with a quote from Reagan and a plea:

President Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States when men were free.” We conservatives need to get busy.

The unmistakable tone though was that he expected the people to actually take up the task; furthermore, he was fairly optimistic that conservatives would triumph.

I fear that in the three years between the two books, Levin’s optimism as to whether his manifesto can or will be implemented has waned. Hs writing skills and keen insight remain intact. But his assessment of America’s future is bleaker. He again concludes with a quote from Reagan, this time followed by a question:

…in his first inaugural address President Reagan told the American people: If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we have achieved so much, prospered as no other people on earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on earth. The price for this freedom has been at times high, but we have never been unwilling to pay that price. It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government. It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams. We’re not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.” So my fellow countrymen, which do we choose, Ameritopia or America?

Alas, previous words betray his concern at the answer.

The essential question is whether, in America, the people’s psychology has been so successfully warped, the individual’s spirit so thoroughly trounced, and the civil society’s institutions so effectively overwhelmed that revival is possible. Have too many among us already surrendered or been conquered? Can the people overcome the constant and relentless influences of ideological indoctrination, economic manipulation, and administrative coerciveness, or have they become hopelessly entangled in and dependent on a ubiquitous federal government? Have the Pavlovian appeals to radical egalitarianism, and the fomenting of jealousy and faction through class warfare and collectivism, conditioned the people to accept or even demand compulsory uniformity as just and righteous? Is it accepted and routine that the government has sufficient license to act whenever it claims to do so for the good of the people and against the selfishness of the individual?

No society is guaranteed perpetual existence. But I have to believe that the American people are not ready for servitude, for if this is our destiny, and the destiny of our children, I cannot conceive that any people, now or in the future, will successfully resist it for long. I have to believe that this generation of Americans will not condemn future generations to centuries of misery and darkness.

Perhaps if enough people read Ameritopia and take it to heart, Levin’s implicit pessimism will prove unfounded.
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This review also appeared in The Intellectual Conservative at:
as well as in The Land of the Free at:

Repairing Our Republic: Is Anyone Serious About the Effort?

The reasons for the dismay of those on the right are easy to state. In short, they see an ongoing, and in some ways, accelerating erosion of the political philosophy and cultural mores that strongly defined the nation from the eighteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth.

When reporting the results of exit polls in Republican presidential primaries, the media often offers up the numbers according to various groupings. Common categories that are meant to identify the different components of the right wing of the Republican Party include: Tea Party supporters, those who consider themselves very conservative and Evangelical Christians. Many in these far from disjoint camps, as well as some libertarians, are of the opinion that the fundamental political/cultural structure of the country is broken. This is a serious accusation – one that is likely to be ridiculed by those on the left and which, in addition, will probably mystify those in the middle.

The purpose here is to explain why those who believe that the Republic is in need of repair feel as they do; then to describe why liberals consider the charge ridiculous, and also what accounts for the puzzlement in the middle. Lastly, the question of whether any conservative political or cultural leaders are really attempting to change the country’s progressive politics and corrupted culture is taken up.

The reasons for the dismay of those on the right are easy to state. In short, they see an ongoing, and in some ways, accelerating erosion of the political philosophy and cultural mores that strongly defined the nation from the eighteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth. The original political philosophy emphasized individual liberty as the raison d’être for the US, to be achieved via: separation and strict enumeration of powers in a representative, but sharply limited government; equality before the law; federalism; and sovereignty of the people, not the government. The cultural mores embraced: free markets; American exceptionalism; strong families and communities; pursuit and promotion of virtues like modesty, honesty, industriousness and tolerance; strong morals grounded in religious faith; and rugged individualism.

This entire program has been under relentless assault by progressives for a century and – sad to say – they have been remarkably successful in undermining it. Those who believe that the original political/cultural structure of the nation has been drastically altered see, in its stead: a gargantuan federal government that is bankrupting the nation via profligate, irresponsible spending and crippling its markets via obtrusive, irrational and counterproductive regulation; liberty sacrificed before the alter of equality and fairness; the vassalization of the States by an exceedingly powerful central government; infidelity to the Constitution; a land of opportunity morphing into an entitlement society; the denigration of American history; the destruction of the family through the encouragement of promiscuity, out of wedlock conception and same-sex marriage; marginalization of religion and its virtual banishment from the national discourse. The list could be extended, but one can sum up with the observation that early twenty first century America looks less and less like the society envisioned by Locke, Montesquieu, Jefferson or Madison – to whose ideals we were faithful for more than a century – and more and more like a Euro-style, social welfare state in which a massive, benignly-intentioned, but tyrannical central government dominates the lives of its citizens. In the process, said government destroys liberty, hobbles the economy, weakens the nation’s defenses and corrupts the people’s morals. That is not the country for which our forefathers pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor.

Any liberal who reads the preceding would deem its author at best sadly mistaken and at worst completely daft. Liberals/progressives are motivated by the conviction that while the society established by our Founders might have been appropriate for a small, agrarian, homogeneous country in the eighteenth century, it is completely inadequate for the governance of a third millennium nation that is vast, diverse and post-industrial. Anyway, the original structure was deeply flawed by its acquiescence to slavery, ill treatment of women, jingoistic patriotism and neglect of the downtrodden. The changes that the Progressive movement has brought to America have made it a fairer, more just and enlightened society. Conservatives indulge their reactionary fantasies when they envision a return to “founding principles.” Au contraire, we must strive to perfect America further by completing the progressive tasks left unfinished thus far.

And then there are those “in the middle” who either rue or are mystified by one or both of the two opposite points of view just enumerated. They consider hardcore conservatives or dyed-in-the-wool liberals to be extreme. They see some value – and much craziness – in both sides and feel that the correct course is to select what is beneficial to the country from each and disregard the rest.

The author considers himself on the right (not to mention in the right). I see the country’s structure as broken and I believe that the continuing progressive onslaught will eventually – if it has not already – destroy the constitutional republic established by the Founders. But in some ways my greatest scorn is reserved for the puzzled folks in the middle. The lefties have a clear vision of where they want to take the country. They are tragically wrong in their goals and it will be our ruination if they succeed. But they are clear-headed about their aims. The moderates, centrists and independents are, on the other hand, either confused, apathetic or inattentive. They try to tread a line in between traditionalists and radicals. But the visions of the left and right are irreconcilable and it is logically incoherent to attempt to blend them or cherry pick from between them. In fact, because the national conversation has been so skewed to the left for so long, the mystified middlemen wind up, in the end, the unwitting accomplices of the left in the implementation of the Progressive agenda. It is clearly, therefore, an urgent task for rightists to help the centrists to see the tea leaves as they truly are – and to convince them of the justice of the cause of restoring America’s original political/cultural structure.

So is that happening? Are there any conservative political or cultural leaders who see the situation clearly and are attempting to do something about it? Among the “final four,” not so much. Gingrich represents those who understand, but who are so undisciplined, quixotic or self-aggrandizing that they are willing to subvert the cause by sitting on the couch with Nancy Pelosi. Santorum represents those who are sincere, but also basically clueless about the opposition. If they gained influence and power, they wouldn’t know what to do with it. (OK, Santorum has dropped out; but “final three” is not so catchy.) Then there is Paul, who understands, but whose solutions only address half the problem. His policies in pursuit of the other half might make matters worse. Finally, Romney, an “establishment Republican,” might actually understand but fears that expressing such an understanding is neither a means to power nor a way to exercise it should he get it.

There are indeed some who are trying valiantly: Paul Ryan, Jim DeMint, Mike Pence among the politicians; various pundits like Rush Limbaugh; business executives such as the Koch brothers; entertainers like Jon Voight; and Foundation heads like Edwin Feulner (Heritage), Edward Crane (Cato) and Arthur Brooks (American Enterprise Institute). But I am not so sure that the people want to be led where these conservative leaders would take them. The Founders were great leaders. But they took the people where the people already wanted to go. If there is to be a conservative restoration, it can only come about if the people wish it. Unfortunately, for several generations, the people have been subjected to a progressive brainwashing by the mainstream media and government-controlled public schools. Perhaps that is where conservative leaders need to focus their efforts.

Coming Apart at the Class Seams

A review of Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart, and some comments on Yuval Levin’s review of it in The Weekly Standard

Charles Murray has written several books that have had a major impact on cultural and political discussion in America. Losing Ground (1984) and The Bell Curve (1994, with Richard Hernnstein) are the two best known – although Levin believes that In Pursuit (1988) is Murray’s finest work. Murray’s thoughts have been propelled to the forefront of the nation’s attention again with his most recent book Coming Apart.

In the book, Murray documents – and I mean documents; the charts, tables and graphs are copious and convincing – his latest thesis, which is: “America is coming apart at the seams, not seams of race or ethnicity, but of class.” Murray draws a detailed and poignant portrait of two new classes that have sprouted in America – which he calls the new elite or new upper class and the new lower class. Put simply, the former consists of people with very high levels of education, vocational achievement and wealth, whereas the latter is made up of those who lack all three and instead manifest poverty (or at best bare subsistence), no more than a high school diploma (and often not that) and either no vocation or only menial and inconstant paid labor – likely on the government dole in one way or another.

Now America has never lacked for people who fit either description (except perhaps for the government dole component). But their existence in the past was accompanied by connections between them and shared values amongst them. These commonalities increasingly do not exist between the two new classes. According to Murray, this disjointedness arises in two ways. The first is geographical. The new upper class typically lives and works in enclaves which are so sheltered that the denizens barely (and in many cases, never) interact with members of the new lower class. The latter might have some feel for how the former live from the media, but the new upper classes often have absolutely no idea how the lower class lives. More devastatingly, asserts Murray, the more critical divide between the classes is reflected in each group’s manifestations of the civic virtues that were always responsible for and reflected American exceptionalism – or as Murray labels it, the American project: that is, those special qualities or behaviors displayed by her citizens that made America unique among the nations. That special code (or as it used to be called, the American creed) consisted of a set of ideals or virtues, identified by the Founders and elaborated upon by De Tocqueville, around which America organized itself, and through which it expressed its devotion to the cause of individual liberty, limited government and the pursuit of happiness. In Murray’s words:

The American project…consists of the continuing effort, begun with the founding, to demonstrate that human beings can be left free as individuals and families to live their lives as they see fit, coming together voluntarily to solve their joint problems. The polity based on that idea led to a civic culture that was seen as exceptional by the world. That culture was so widely shared among Americans that it amounted to a civil religion. To be an American was to be different from other nationalities, in ways that Americans treasured. That culture is unraveling.

Murray selects four aspects of the project (or creed), against which he measures the state of compliance with the creed by the new classes’ members: industriousness, honesty, marriage and religion. He reveals statistically the health of these components of the creed for each of the two classes. Later, he broadens these four aspects into wider areas of life – vocation, community, family and faith – against which he engages in an even more elaborate data analysis to ascertain how well each of the classes is upholding its role in the American project.

Murray’s conclusion is that the project is alive and well among the new upper class, but nearly defunct within the new lower class. Moreover, Murray claims, despite their ability, indeed obligation, to do so, the upper class makes no attempt to promote its values to the lower class. It fails to “preach what it practices.” Thus unlike any time in the past, America has become a society with disjoint classes. One class no longer subscribes to the tenets of American exceptionalism, and although the other practices them, it no longer has faith in the ideal. Murray asserts that the situation is unsustainable. If it persists, the American project will die. America will cease to be an exceptional nation and the precious heritage of human freedom that America has stood for will vanish from the Earth.

Now, while generally laudatory in his review, Levin (in the March 18, 2012 edition of the Weekly Standard) has two major beefs with Murray’s hypothesis. Murray identifies a date on which the tear in America’s class seam originated – November 22, 1963, the date of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The vast majority of Murray’s statistical measures compare the state of America today – or at some point in the last 50 years – to what existed the day before Kennedy was killed. Moreover, Levin asserts – correctly, I believe – that Murray is presuming that the classless nature of American society, and more generally, the almost uniform acceptance by the people of the creed, existed in an unbroken fashion from the eighteenth century until the 1960s. But says Levin:

The fact is that America in the immediate postwar years was made possible by an utterly unrepeatable set of circumstances, and setting out to re-create it is not a constructive objective for public policy. What we need to do, instead, is to seek for ways to achieve broadly shared prosperity and cultural vitality today – to balance cohesion and dynamism in our time, which is a time of great tension and change.

That this is hardly the first era of tension and change in our history should leave us more hopeful than Murray suggests, and should send us looking for guidance in eras prior to the postwar golden age. Murray implies that his description of America in 1963 applied to America before this time as well – from the era of the founding until half a century ago. But surely this is not the case. In other times—in periods of social tension, economic upheaval, mass immigration, and cultural transformation – America’s founding virtues have been under immense strain. But time and again, we have found our way to national revival – cultural, moral, religious, social, political, and economic. We have experienced multiple golden ages, and they have not all looked alike.

Perhaps it is this extraordinary capacity for the renewal of our founding virtues, rather than the particular strength we possessed 50 years ago, that really makes America exceptional. If so, then Murray’s project, which should be America’s project, is in better stead than this ultimately pessimistic book suggests.

Levin’s second beef is that Murray seems to be placing the blame for, and the need to fix the current mess on the upper class. Again Levin:

In this sense, Murray’s book suffers from a flaw that bears some similarity to the one that renders the liberal case regarding inequality largely incoherent. That case seeks to blame the wealthy for the growing gap between the top and the bottom, and in the process, treats the gap itself as the core problem when, in fact, it is the stagnation and decline at the bottom that should worry us most…[The] key factor behind the collapse of poor and working class life in America has been precisely the liberal welfare state [that liberals] hold up as a solution – a welfare state originally constructed on misguided moral premises, which has badly undermined the social institutions essential to human thriving in poor communities, and which now remains as a moldering relic growing increasingly bloated, inefficient, and regressive. The left’s cynical (or else pitiful) disavowal of this fact explains a great deal of its present obsession with inequality.

Murray, of course, suffers from no such self-delusion. He plainly sees how much the welfare state has contributed to the ruin of lower-class life. And he also understands…that the key problems faced by the poor today are fundamentally cultural (and therefore also moral), not simply economic.

Knowing that poorly designed welfare state institutions contributed mightily to these cultural problems does not solve them, however, and while the reform (greatly aided by Murray’s own work) of one especially counterproductive welfare program in the 1990s may have helped to slow the bleeding, it has hardly stopped it. Murray … suggest[s] that America’s elites could help a lot by offering a moral argument for their own way of life: By preaching what they practice, and therefore helping to link the traditional American virtues to examples of lived success…

But surely, this is a highly implausible practical solution to the immense cultural ruin that Murray describes. It is hard to see how the graduates of elite universities who live in their cultural islands of privilege could really speak with any moral authority to the problems of working-class life… Rather, the cultural disaster Murray describes seems to be a failing of America’s moral (and therefore largely its religious) institutions.

I believe that Levin’s second beef is legitimate, but his first is off the mark. Yes, the country has encountered grave crises in its pre-1960s existence – even existential ones such as the Civil War. And we managed to recover each time. But when we encountered major crises in the past, the American creed was intact. We did not have large swatches of the population who no longer had faith in American exceptionalism, who doubted that the US was and is a force for good in the world, who had rejected the basic tenets of our country’s founding, such as: individual liberty trumps group fairness, free markets work better than central planning, traditional morals grounded in religious faith produce superior civic virtues; the US Constitution (as amended) is the supreme law of the land to which all citizens owe complete fidelity. Well we do now. And so one cannot be so sanguine – as Levin is – that we will blast our way out of the sand trap as we have so magnificently in the past.

In the end, despite their disagreements, Murray and Levin come to the same ultimate conclusion as to the key component of the way out. There must be a great moral awakening in the country – among both classes – which recognizes the folly of the Progressive bad trip that we have been on, and results in a rededication to the classic moral principles that guided our Founders and also our ancestors who followed them. Murray thinks that the awakening must be lead by the new upper class. Levin feels that it must arise more spontaneously throughout the entire culture. Whoever is right, I pray that the awakening comes soon.
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This review also appeared in The Intellectual Conservative at:

 

An American Jewish Problem Now Confronts Gentile America

The Rabbi of my synagogue gave a fascinating sermon recently. He praised America as a blessing for its Jewish citizens, but he said that it also threatened their Jewish identity. As he put it: “America is killing us with kindness.” He cited a survey that caused a ruckus a few years ago when it revealed that a surprising number of gentile Americans sought to marry Jews. He went on to point out that America posed a unique problem for its Jewish citizens – a problem virtually unparalleled in the history of the Jewish people.

Specifically, the United States is the first (and arguably the sole) country in world history that is dedicated primarily to the ideals of individual liberty, limited government and sacred personal rights granted by God and not the government. Because of the environment created by this credo, Jews, like all Americans, are free to choose their spiritual, cultural and economic paths in life without being subject to a veto of their plans by any corporal higher authority – of course, within the rule of law. The modus operandi of Jewish civilization over the millennia is quite different. As the Rabbi phrased it, Jewish life is more dictated by “commandment” than by individual freedom. First and foremost, the Jew is enjoined to be faithful to God’s law, as transmitted by Moses, which entails a great deal of limitation on his individual freedom. One can argue – and scores have – that it is precisely this faithfulness to binding commandments that has allowed the Jews to survive many centuries of persecution and torment.

But Jews are not persecuted or tormented in America. We are free to pursue our individual dreams as much as is any other American citizen. And we have done so, with a remarkable degree of success. Furthermore, our beloved country has welcomed and celebrated our success as much as it has for individuals from any other ethnic or religious group. Ah, but there is the rub. Observing the success of their American Jewish brethren and ancestors, increasing numbers of Jewish youth have opted to pursue their individual dreams at the expense of their Jewish heritage. Thus the Rabbi’s humorous lament that “America is killing us with kindness.”

Now how does this Jewish problem translate over to a problem for gentile America? The issue is a clash between an individual’s identity as a member of some religious, ethnic, racial or regional subgroup of Americans as opposed to his identity as an American.

It is my contention that prior to the Civil War, the issue arose primarily with regard to region and race. Ethnically and religiously, the country was relatively, but certainly not completely homogeneous. While the people were mainly of European ancestry, ethnic Germans and ethnic Irish often did not see eye-to–eye, for example. Similarly, while the population was overwhelmingly Christian, the variety of sects and denominations often made for contentious relations. But among the vast majority of these groupings, disharmony between them was not reflected in any group feeling disaffected from the national ethos. There was no fundamental clash between any individual’s ethnic or religious identity and those of the nation as a whole.

This was not true in matters of race or region. The slave population certainly could not identify with American principles since the benefits of those principles were denied to them. And because of that, when combined with certain economic considerations, a huge regional divide opened up between North and South. Furthermore, those in the South definitely felt a disconnect between their moral values and those of the national psyche.

The regional issue was resolved by the Civil War, although the racial issue would take another century to heal. But here is my point: despite massive immigration – whose people the US did an amazing job of digesting, assimilating and fusing with the native population – during the roughly 75-year period from 1875 to 1950, the issue essentially did not arise. During this period, Americans by in large felt little conflict between their local identity (be it religious, ethnic or whatever) and their identity as Americans. (Again, there may have been conflicts between different groups, but very few felt a sense of alienation from their country’s ethos.)

The 1960s would put an end to that. Actually, the progressive cancer had been eating away at traditional America for more than half a century. But it was in the latter part of the twentieth century that traditional America succumbed to the lethal progressive advance. The country ceased to be committed in a primal way to individual liberty, limited government and, as Mr. Jefferson, put it, unalienable rights endowed by the Creator. Increasingly, our rights came from the federal government, a government which ruled by its own designs and not according to the consent of the governed. As a consequence, many segments of the American population found themselves at odds with the national government. Some of those segments included: white males – who were beset at every turn by government policies that disfavored them; WASPs – who fell prey to multiculturalism; entrepreneurs – who came under suspicion because they earned too much money; gun owners – viewed as a threat to the increasingly hegemonic federal government; rural Americans – considered provincial, backward and reactionary; but above all else, religious people – deemed hopelessly retrograde and a threat to the progressive script for a secular, humanist America made safe for unlimited abortion, same-sex marriage and illegal immigration. Even patriots became suspect as America was now seen as a flawed country, not at all exceptional among the nations.

Many in these groups now found themselves in the same place as American Jews. Namely, there arose a fundamental clash between their communal values and those foisted upon them by a distant national government.

There are two basic differences in the nature of the problem faced (for at least three generations) by Jewish Americans and the somewhat newer problem experienced by portions of gentile America. First, for Jews, the choice was between two pleasant alternatives. Not so for Americans who feel oppressed by a gargantuan, debt-ridden, unresponsive government. The second difference is in how the two communities deal with the problem. At least for now, disfavored Americans are fighting back – convening TEA parties, trying to capture the Republican Party and thereby the controls of government, working feverishly in political, cultural and economic spheres to restore America to its traditional roots. It is a formidable challenge, but they seek to change the national paradigm.

Jews cannot imagine such a capability. Constituting less than 2% of the population (already a devastating indicator of our precarious state as in 1950 we constituted 4%), we are not about to change the ethos of the nation. But I have argued that the progressives managed to do so. And how has that change impacted the Jews? The halving of our percentage of the population supplies the answer: not well! In fact, a tremendous percentage of American Jewry has bought into the progressive line and has switched its allegiance from Judaism to liberalism. (This is explained brilliantly in Norman Podhoretz’s book, Why Are Jews Liberal.) The remaining part of American Jewry has the daunting task of on the one hand, joining with the disfavored segments of American society that seek to restore a traditional America, while at the same time, retaining their Jewish identity in a restored America of individual liberty.
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This article also appeared in The Intellectual Conservative at:

Two Views of America’s Predicament

Those who harbor misgivings about the nation’s predicament, which is the result of leftist policies, do so from two completely different philosophical perspectives, with two radically different understandings of the fundamental causes of the predicament and two mutually exclusive recipes for redressing them. No, I am not talking about the left-right divide in America, but instead a less well understood schism found in the center-right.

National polls reveal that a substantial majority of Americans believe the country is “headed in the wrong direction.” Consumer confidence measurements persist at low levels. The electorate oscillates wildly back and forth between left and right and the public holds our national leaders in astonishingly low esteem. Movements like the TEA Party on the right and Occupy Wall Street on the left suggest that the discontent is broad as well as deep. Furthermore, it is common to hear the opinion that this current trough in American self-confidence is unlike previous instances of national disquiet in that Americans have always believed that we could overcome our problems and maintain our status as the strongest, freest and most prosperous nation on Earth – whereas this time many Americans fear that if we don’t right the ship very soon, the nation is doomed to permanently lose its strength, freedom and prosperity.

While this feeling is widespread, I will argue here that those who harbor it do so from two completely different philosophical perspectives, with two radically different understandings of the fundamental causes of our predicament and two mutually exclusive recipes for redressing them. No, I am not talking about the left-right divide in America, but instead a less well understood schism found in the center-right.

Most studies of political/cultural/social philosophy in the United States divide the population into three broad categories: (i) those on the left, aka liberals or progressives; (ii) the cohort on the right, aka conservatives (usually including libertarians, although that inclusion is somewhat problematic); and (iii) the center consisting of moderates or independents. I have argued recently (in this blog) that, since the respective visions for America in the 21st century promulgated by the left and right are so radically at odds with each other, those in the middle are straddling an untenable fence. The two visions are so irreconcilable that there is no viable middle ground between them and any attempt to maintain such a position is tantamount to a “non-Solomonic splitting of the baby.” Nevertheless, the middle exists and, if anything, seems to be growing as more and more voters identify themselves as Independents, while fewer and fewer subscribe to one of the labels Republican or Democrat.

I have also argued (in the previously referenced post, and in another, longer piece in this journal) that, for decades, the leftist vision has been conquering the nation while support for rightist ideas atrophies. Witness:

  • The federal government has grown to gargantuan proportions; the federal budget now consumes a quarter of GDP (historically, it’s rarely exceeded 18-19%); the federal deficit has ballooned to $15 trillion – roughly equal to GDP, and continues to grow at an alarming rate that foreshadows a cataclysmic debt crisis; and federal regulations, which have exploded in number, complexity and scale, are choking the life out of businesses, large and small.
  • The military is shrinking and our standing in the world is in decline. In a misguided effort to replace hard power by soft power, we coddle dictators and abuse our allies.
  • Our culture is saturated with pornography, banality and immorality; the marriage rate is down; the out-of-wedlock birthrate is skyrocketing; drug use is mushrooming; and traditional values are threatened.
  • Our leaders are obsessed with peripheral and specious issues like climate change, diversity and gay rights, but they ignore critical problems like illegal immigration, a failed educational system and anti-Christian bias.
  • Our economy is beset by permanent slow growth and chronic high unemployment.

Now amazingly, the massive discontent that we see on the left – typified by the Occupy Wall Street movement – expresses itself by asserting that we have not pursued strongly enough the leftist policies that are already subverting America. In particular, they say: we have not closed Guantanamo; same sex marriage is not universal; unions are not sufficiently powerful or ubiquitous; Roe v. Wade is under assault; the internet is not yet regulated; fossil fuels have not been banned; the pledge of allegiance still contains the phrase “under God”; 10-15 million illegal aliens have not been legalized; corporate executives make too much money; and, horror of horrors, Israel still exists. To me, these are the rants of a deranged bus driver who is guiding his vehicle straight toward the edge of a precipice over which he will plunge if he doesn’t stop, but his only concern is that the speed of his vehicle is not sufficiently high. I discount the leftist view of America’s predicament – the success of the left is precisely America’s predicament.

It is the folks in the center and on the right who have a better appreciation for how the developments of the last 80 years have placed our nation in mortal danger. But within that broad group – although there is wide agreement that the country has slipped off the tracks and is in danger of an existential calamity – those who recognize the danger manifest two fundamentally different ways of understanding the predicament.

One group, with representatives largely from the center, but many also from the right, sees the matter in purely a technical way. They believe: the government spends too much – it must spend less; there is enormous waste, fraud and mismanagement in the government – it must be run more efficiently and transparently; climate change is a diversion, if not a hoax – the government must focus on more serious problems that we face like energy shortages; peripheral issues and groups (gays, illegal aliens, Muslim minorities) receive too much attention – we must do a better job of addressing mainstream concerns; we don’t save enough, don’t drive carefully enough, take too many drugs and eat too much – we need to have our schools focus on teaching our children better habits; we shouldn’t coddle our enemies abroad – we must engage our allies more effectively in an effort to isolate our enemies more cleverly; our system of federal taxation/regulation is too onerous – we have to streamline it.

In short, this group does not see that the fundamental character of America has been altered. Instead they see too many extreme and ineffective policies – the answer to which is not to go to opposite extremes, but instead to find pragmatic solutions by careful assessment, more prudent management, and more skillful political actions by the government. With the exception of Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party – since Coolidge – has been nominating people with such an outlook as its candidate for President of the United States. Some have won, some haven’t. But which of those who won has made the slightest progress in reversing America’s slide toward socialism? And now that we are on the verge of being destroyed by our problems, the GOP is poised to nominate yet another one.

The other group, comprising mainly those on the right, but also some centrists, sees the issue not as one of poor management, but rather rooted in the political/philosophical changes that have occurred in the country. They believe that the US has strayed in a major way from the principles of its founding documents, that we are barely a constitutional republic under the rule of law, and scarcely dedicated to maximizing individual liberty, adhering to free market capitalism, pursuing the moral values that animated our forefathers. Instead we have morphed into a Euro welfare state, a soft tyranny in which a bloated government usurps our God-given rights, subverts our free market system, and imposes a secular humanist agenda on us – and especially on our children in government-run schools. The solution is not better management of the government, but a return of the country to the founding principles that accounted for our strength, freedom and prosperity. In order to do so, we need not only a president who understands our predicament in this way, but also legislators and jurists, religious leaders and media moguls, educators and generals. Only then will we restore America to its constitutional moorings and resolve our current predicament.
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This article also appeared in The Intellectual Conservative at: