What’s Wrong with the World

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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Symbol of Hubris

Five years ago this day, President Bush executed a landing aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, following the exploit with a speech delivered before a banner reading "Mission Accomplished". The speech proclaimed the end of combat operations.

In commemoration of this august occasion, Clark Stooksbury treats the reader to a selection of delectable quotes, which adjudge Bush to be one of our greatest Presidents, and express the hope that other similar deeds of world-historical greatness will be performed throughout the Near East. It wasn't, though, merely the Respectable Right which swooned that day, but the media much more generally, as Leon Hadar reminds us. Kool-Aid was an exceedingly popular commodity in those days, which demonstrates that the hubris and hegemonism the left would like to pin on Bush and the Republicans is a bipartisan phenomenon, the veritable world-image of the establishment.

Only the far left (and this perhaps incidentally; in politics, one can begin with dodgy premises and yet arrive at the correct conclusions) and the so-called unpatriotic conservatives possessed both conviction and prescience, the latter ridiculed at the time as the oldthought of those who could not grasp that Bush's bold policies created their own realities. Frum himself was shortly to retreat from the implications of his own malodorous effusion, effectively defining a lack of patriotism down into mere defeatism, a euphemism meaning 'skepticism concerning the wisdom and prudence of administration policies, and their prospects of success.' There was something inadvertently prophetic in that elision, something all too characteristic of what the Respectable Right became in the Bush years, when one's loyalty to, and love of, country could be deconstructed because one opposed government policy; government and country were identified; no, more than this, country and president were identified.

That carrier landing was profoundly symbolic, not only of the world-historical folly of an administration, but of the entire atmosphere of those times, in which support for the policies of one man (and the machiavels advisors behind him) could be made a synecdoche for the country. What is disquieting is the realization that present distempers may not be due to the recognition of the folly of such things, but rather to the dispelling of the illusion. We relish that Kool-Aid, and resent mornings-after for coming.

Comments (5)

"...characteristic of what the Respectable Right became in the Bush years..."

In retrospect, the road to ruin was paved back in the 80's. Reagan's Cold War rhetoric touting the revolutionary nature of free markets, the disdain for limits, the exultation of endless growth and worship of Progress, albeit from a rightist perspective, set the course. At the time we rolled our eyes and just dismissed it as necessary to marshalling public opinion. Things worsened though with the Gingrich Congress and the advent of party yahoos on talk radio. "The end of history" nonsense revealed the extent of the neo-con takeover of journals and think-tanks. Almost overnight, the very nature of conservatism was altered.

The way back home won't be easy, not with 4 years of McCain looming as an outside possibility. But, it is a trip we'll have to make.

At the time we rolled our eyes and just dismissed it as necessary to marshalling public opinion.

Many of us rolled our eyes and clucked our tongues, on the assumption that these rhetorical furbelows were justified by the exigencies of the Cold War. Except for the fact that they never ceased, but only intensified, with the denouement of that epoch-making struggle. In retrospect, yes, they ought to have be apprehended as signs of decadence, and the response of the establishment right to Buchanan's candidacies ought to have been seen as the proof that they weren't merely rhetorical flourishes.

In retrospect, the road to ruin was paved back in the 80's. Reagan's Cold War rhetoric touting the revolutionary nature of free markets, the disdain for limits, the exultation of endless growth and worship of Progress, albeit from a rightist perspective, set the course.

That may be so. I certainly think John Zmirak is right to notice the importance of the abstraction of America into an armed doctrine to set against the marching madness of Communism, which occurred during the Cold War.

What I find more dubious is the attachment of this phenomenon to Reagan's name. It seems to me that one of the things which separates that statesman from his soi disant inheritors is a surer foundation in realism. In his fine history of the Reagan age, Steven Hayward very shrewdly points to Reagan's experience as a union leader, working against attempts by Communists to coopt the union, as a formative experience for him. That sort of experience leaves a thoughtful man forever wary of armed doctrines, and inoculates him against the heresy that, as Chesterton put it, "ideas are more real than men."

Paul's remarks are certainly fair, my only caveat being that, while Reagan may have uttered such phraseology rhetorically, or intended by it something more circumscribed, his auditors assuredly did not so interpret it - with the tragic consequences we have witnessed, lo, these past seventeen years. Growing up, I listened to that rhetoric, and understood that it portended something quite specific: resistance to, and the defeat of, the armed doctrines of communism. To neoconservatives, alas, it meant something more expansive and expansionary; not the countering of a threat, but a sort of secular politico-economic messianism.

"It seems to me that one of the things which separates that statesman from his soi disant inheritors is a surer foundation in realism."

Certainly that is true, especially regarding foreign policy, but Reagan's rhetoric on the economy, an extreme reaction to Carter's "malaise" speech and clueless Administration, took reckless flight from reality too. A genuinely conservative world-view recognizes limits and accepts finitude. It is hard to find such an acknowledgement in Reagan. Given the almost mythic life he lead and the circumstances of his time, it is understandable from the perspective of needing to rally a weary nation. Reality, however has caught up to the American Way.

As the days of cheap energy and cheap credit recede into memory and the efficacy of markets to self-correct their own excesses is called into doubt, it will be incumbent for conservatives to re-write the narrative Reagan left them. The way capitalism acts as a solvent to traditional modes of living will also have to be addressed. The lone Ranger, a.k.a. Self-Made Man setting out on his own, free of familial and communal attachements and obligations is an icon whose day has come and gone. Conservatives will have to return to their more communitarian roots, if they wish to pose a serious and legitimate alternative to the Left.

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