Note: This was also posted at GIGO-Soapbox.org.
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Jumping the Shark
Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry. Rome had defended the household gods and the human decencies against the ogres of Africa and the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece. But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask: 'What is truth?' So in that drama which decided the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed in what seems the reverse of his true role. Rome was almost another name for responsibility. Yet he stands for ever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible. Man could do no more. Even the practical had become the impracticable. Standing between the pillars of his own judgement-seat, a Roman had washed his hands of the world.
-- G.K. Chesterton, "The Everlasting Man"
Almost two years ago in "Conservatives Should Be Pleased," George Will chided conservatives for doubting George Bush's conservatism: "Some conservatives are caught in a time warp. Bush is, second only to Ronald Reagan and not second by much, the most conservative president in living memory. And Bush is, as successful leaders tend to be, lucky."
Frankly, notwithstanding George Will's view, many conservatives view President Bush as quite moderate. Additionally, this moderate view of George Bush is mirrored by most Americans, which makes the Left's shrill comparisons of Bush's "extreme" conservatism perplexing to them. Perhaps with constant repetition, this propaganda may prove to be compelling, but for now, MoveOn.org's comparisons of Bush to Hitler, the GOP to the Nazi party, and administration members to Nazi personalities are beyond the pale. It's downright scary that a significant segment of the American population has gone off the deep end, and that their closest ideological relations are unwilling to tap them on the shoulder to explain this embarrassment.
But these unbalanced comparisons of Bush to Hitler are an inevitable result of moral relativism. This is emotivism in full bloom -- when objective moral judgements are reduced to mere strong objections, it is no surprise that they would grasp at the culture's sole unambiguous personification of evil. These people look crazy because they've lost the ability to speak in moral terms. How can one say that Bush is bad, when they deny the possibility of judging good from bad?
Peggy Noonan, God bless her, hastily modified her biography of Ronald Reagan, "When Character was King," in the wake of the 9-11 attacks. She correctly saw that the turning point in the Cold War was Reagan's clear and unequivocal pronouncements about the characteristic evil of the communist system. She had hoped that President Bush would mirror Reagan's actions. In her columns, she looks hopefully toward the president, praying that he is guided by the God he professes.
I too hope these same things. But deeply mired in all these factual comparisons, just as liberals miss the forest for the trees, we hope that these positive attributes of George Bush will add up to a great president. We want to see an honest man. We want to see a man of deep faith. We want to see a man of character. He is all these things, but as an artist might be able to mimic the brushstrokes of Michelangelo, it doesn't mean that he will be able to capture the genius of Michelangelo.
Simply put George W. Bush's roots do not run as deep as Ronald Reagan's roots did.
This is not a broadside against Bush's character. It is a broadside against a culture. Just as Reagan might be one of the best of his generation, Bush may very well be one of the best of his generation. That's not good enough.
The folks at MoveOn.org et al. aren't that far off, at least temporally. Let me explain. First off, this is not your ordinary partisan shrill prophecy of doom, predicting that a dictatorship is soon to come because my side is not in power. This is my not-so-shrill prophecy of doom, while (nominally at least) my side is in power. The comparison is not that we are in those sharps days before the National Socialists, heady from electoral victories, grabbed dictatorial powers lest the chance slip away. It's not the time of the Reichstag fire. No, the comparison aligns more closely to that soggy period before, in the 1920s when a quasi-nihilistic German society is trying to feel its way through the soft Weimar Republic.
In "Crunchy or Soggy," John Derbyshire has a good definition of soggy, "Light switches no longer turn on or off: they dim." It's hard to define right or wrong, good or evil in a society that demands that we suspend judgment. Who can say whether the light switch is on or off?
When tradition is dissipated, men do not respond to the old moral injunctions satisfactorily; and our circumstances and national character differing from Sweden's, I do not think we would experience the comparative good fortune to slip into an equalitarian boredom. The contract of eternal society forgotten, soon every lesser form of contract would lose its sanction. I say, then, that we need to shake out of their complacency the liberals who are smug in their conviction of the immortality of Liberal Democratic Folkways in the United States, and the conservatives who are smug in their conviction of the abiding superiority of the American Standard of Living. Political arrangements, and economic systems, rest upon the foundation of moral prejudices which find their expression in tradition.
In the above, Russell Kirk is concerned about the decay of the contract of eternal society. The greatest generation of the Twentieth Century (at least as Tom Brokaw sees it), that same generation which Reagan was part of, failed to impart the importance of that contract to the following generation. It may be excused because they were too busy fighting the evils of their time. Or more likely, the baby boomers declined to accept the contract. As the late Michael Kelly observed the fruit the baby boomer generation had borne, "to judge others is, for Ms. Hornstein's generation of properly educated young elites, the great taboo."
Of the Supreme Court's decision on campaign finance reform, Jonah Goldberg asks, "By the way, where the hell is this much-vaunted blogosphere?" There should be no doubt in anyone's mind that I'm not qualified to answer that question, but perhaps this duffer might get a hole-in-one. The answer, in the most Goldbergesque fashion I can muster, is that the shark has been jumped [1]. And it has been jumped two different ways. Perhaps he misses this because he has been sympathetic to the homosexual cause [2]. The Supreme Court raised sodomy to the level of a constitutional right, and the Massachusetts Supreme Court demanded that the Massachusetts Legislature legalize gay marriage. After figuratively shouting itself hoarse, the blogoshere might rightly conclude that the judiciary in America is quite immune to the ire of the populous short of a lynch mob. The other aspect Mr. Goldberg may have missed because of partisanship. Simply, a Republican lead Congress passed campaign finance reform and a Republican president signed it into law. It is quite a stretch to expect the ever-errant courts to do their job correctly when our elected officials won't.
References to the shining city upon a hill, and Frumian rallying cries against the "Axis of Evil" must necessarily be built on a historical tradition and a moral framework. Failing that, these pronouncements become jingoistic. Does our average high school graduate know of the Axis our country faced in the Second World War? And more importantly, is he able to identify evil? Failing these marks, no matter how well Bush performs in his speeches, it will fail to resonate in the rootless generation. And should this young man be told that the old Axis was dominated by the Nazi terror, how could he judge that against the name calling of MoveOn.org? Would he reach the heights attained by Ms. Hornstein? For that matter, can any society, unable to decide whether two sexes are required to start a family (the very basic building block of society), be able to tell good from evil? Indeed, in some respects, our soggy republic is in far worse shape than the Weimar Republic before it fell.
We are the city upon the hill, dimly, soggily reflecting God's shining light. While the deep-rooted Reagan optimistically highlighted the positive aspect of John Winthrop's City upon a Hill, it should be remembered that Winthrop's sermon warned of our doom:
soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a byword through the world, wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the wayes of god and all professours for Gods sake; wee shall shame the faces of many of gods worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into Cursses upon us till wee be consumed out of the good land whether wee are going.
Copyright 2004, Robert H. LeBlanc